Homeschool Preschool Week 7

We were on vacation last week, so this week involved recovering from the vacation (laundry, cleaning, getting back on a routine).  We ended up doing a lot of learning activities, but most of them were ad-hoc things I came up with or games that we hadn't played with in a while.  Here are some of the things we did..



 

When I was bringing things over from the other house (in our neverending process of moving), I found some binders I made for the kids when they were about 18 months old, with clear holders and various worksheet pages (I can assure you that my kids were only scribbling on them at 18 months, and maybe pointing at different shapes and colors).  L and E both enjoyed their special activities, especially the mazes and shape tracing, and asked for their binders over and over.  I think that for our future Preschool sessions, we'll always start with their binders which I can rotate with different worksheet pages to keep things interesting.

 

During my cleaning/organizing I also found sets of shapes that can be put in order by relative size (I think these were free printables from Montessori Print Shop, but I don't remember since I made these for the girls before they were even 2, and it was above their heads at the time).  I love finding activities and toys that I totally forgot about.  L and E both mastered ordering by size with limited guidance.

Another geometry activity as playing with pattern block tiles freehand (without trying to make specific shapes based on templates).

For pre-writing practice, I showed the girls how to draw straight lines with a ruler.  At first they practiced on their own, then I held the ruler for them to make spiders' webs:


 

I love the smiling spider that E drew!

The girls also wanted to make their own connect-the-dots activities:

They made random dots on their paper and then connected them.  When they were done, we tried to figure out what the resulting shape looked like, and made up some stories.  L especially enjoyed creating connect-the-dots activities for Mommy.  She kept calling me 'sweetheart' when I was connecting her dots!

L continued the connect-the-dots adventures another day when we were painting.  We did a lot of arts and crafts this week.  Even Baby H (12 months old) got into the fun with his own edible Jell-O paint:

He wasn't quite sure what to make of it, but had a good time exploring...

The girls took turns playing educational computer games.  Here E (3) is mesmerized by a game that her Mommy made - one of the advantages of my former computer career is that if I don't find the types of educational games that I want for my kids, I can make them myself!