Homeschool Preschool Week 3

L and E (37 months) have just completed their 3rd week for "Homeschool Preschool".  We're still trying to stick with a daily routine, but it's become a lot more flexible.  There are days when they clearly want to play without me, so I let them play while I get some work done.  Other days, L will refuse to call me "Mommy", just "Teacher" and both girls beg for their activity boxes.  We just go with the flow..  Here's a review of the types of learning experiences we've been doing...

Cute Stuff My Kids Say

I need to start recording all the neat things my kids have been saying lately.  Here are a few examples:

School Supplies Activity Tray

I'm like a 'kid in a candy store' when it comes to discount school supplies.  A year ago, around this time I found a ton of clearance pencils, erasers, and pencil cases in a craft store, and made a little activity tray for the girls (who were 2 at the time).  For this activity tray, I showed the girls how to place the pencils in the pencil boxes, and how to put the erasers on the pencils.  This year, I reintroduced the tray to the kids and we made up even more games with it...

Preschool Science: Colors and Capillary Action

There are a number of experiments on light and color that I'd like to do with the kids.  Unfortunately, last week I just couldn't find the time to prep the experiments, so we ended up exploring colors (as well as capillary action) spontaneously using materials we had on hand.  It ended up being a lot of fun.  Here's what we did:

Tapping Syllables

One of our file folder games is a syllable-sorting activity which is just a collection of cards with various pictures, and a little sorting mat to identify whether each word has 1, 2, or 3 syllables.  If I had ink in my printer, I could have created these cards myself (or you could use stickers as well).  To make the activity more fun, I brought out our collection of percussion instruments and we played a bunch of early learning games..

Math Games with Animal Counters

My twins (age 3) are obsessed with little animal figures.  Somehow we've ended up with hundreds of them!  When we moved, I rediscovered a tub of 60 plastic animal counters (5 each of 12 animals), and the girls begged to play with them all week.   Here are some easy games I came up with to reinforce math and logic skills for my Preschoolers...