Homeschool Preschool - Week 11

L and E are 3 years old (39 months).  I was still battling a sinus infection this week (which is finally clearing up with antibiotics), so once again our Homeschool Preschool time involved more games, fine motor skills practice, dramatic play, and ad-hoc activities than the usual planned work-trays.  It was a great week for working on visual-spatial reasoning, problem solving, and creativity...

While I had the clothespins out for a different game that I made up (will post about it next week), the kids wanted to decorate bowls and turn them into flowers.  They made a whole garden full of bowl flowers this way, and made to sure to water them and pull the weeds.. so creative!

Even the clothespin basket turned into a fine motor activity with the help of some wooden skewers..

I took out a lot of board games and card games this week, which the girls loved.  Here E is putting sorting by both color and shape using Qwirkle game pieces.  She worked on this while her sister was napping, and really concentrated on the task.  Then she did a bit of building..

She built some chairs, but then decided that they look like toilets and built an entire public restroom facility!

I found a travel-size Perfection game on sale for $5, and we spent a lot of time using it like a puzzle (the girls were intimidated by the timer and always stopped it before time ran out and the pieces popped).

I also took out this memory game (with children around the world), and we played our own version..

I picked a couple of cards and placed them on the table in the living room.  Then I asked the girls to come to the kitchen, and one at a time quickly showed them a picture of one of the faces before asking them to run in the other room to retrieve it.  I thought that this little memory exercise would be tricky for them, but they nailed it.  Then I showed them how to play Guess Who (or 20 Questions) with these cards..

One girl picked a card and hid under the table with it, while the other sister and I asked her questions and tried to guess which card she had picked ("Is it a boy?" "Is he wearing a hat?" etc..etc..) by flipping over the cards that didn't match the answer until there was only one left.

I also tried to teach the kids how to play tic-tac-toe.  They sort of got it, but there was some frustration around drawing the letter X, so the game didn't last very long before we switched to drawing..

 

Hand-tracing was a popular activity this week.

L and I worked together to make this cat out of colorful stir-sticks and some plastic egg parts.  Then throughout the week, L kept practicing making cats on her own..

 

She did an excellent job!

Of course we didn't completely neglect our math and reading skills.  Most of the math exercises the girls did were just little 5-10 minute things at the kitchen table after breakfast, but enough to reinforce some of the concepts we've been practicing. 

One of the days, I had to run upstairs to change Baby H's diaper, so I literally dumped a bunch of picture and letter magnets all over the kitchen table and told the girls to match up the pictures with their first letters.  Imagine my surprise when I came back downstairs and found that L had done this!  I didn't know that she even knew that icecream starts with I because we've only been working on the short-vowel sounds.  This gets me really excited because I think that pretty soon I'll be able to give the girls tasks and have them work on them fairly independently instead of requiring me to constantly sit with them, which will be quite welcome as Baby H gets older and I'll start to work with him more as well. 

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Linking to Weekly Wrap-Up at Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers and Tot School at 1+1+1=1