Our First FULL Week of Playschool

We technically started our "school year" three weeks ago, but because of the trip to Stanford, I decided to split our first week of playschool up. We started on the same Thursday that the school district in our town started and finished our week last week before we went to Stanford. This week, I decided to do a review week. After reading this article, I remembered my days of teaching. I hated how we never had enough review. We always had to sneak it in with the curriculum. It drove me nuts because the kids NEEDED review. I have been using This Reading Mama's Reading the Alphabet curriculum in pieces with Little Man. Well, she builds in review! When she does, she introduces a word family. This week, the word family is -at. It worked well since our last sight word was "at." The activity below was a math activity. Little man rolled the dice and then put the correct number of goldfish crackers on the paper until he covered all 20 squares. This worked well as it also allowed him to have a snack after he counted them all!

Another activity we did this week was building the sight words used in previous lessons. Our letter magnets come from the dollar store, so they are all capitals, but Little Man had fun.

Little Man was very excited to be able to read the decodable text for this week. It was "Scat Cat." He's read it a few times since we first read it on Thursday. I think he's so excited to read.

I'm actually thinking of messing with poor Little Man's mind and going out of alphabetical order as we continue our homeschooling. I want him to be able to actually learn to write. Well, I've found a couple different blogs about rearranging the alphabet and doing the straight lined letters first. This actually makes sense to me! Wish I would have found this out before I started homeschooling, but unfortunately Princess was still in the NICU and Little Man was still going to daycare and I was so overwhelmed. I hadn't assessed Little Man before I started (I know, bad teacher!), so I started WAY too easy for him!

We also used a lot from The Measured Mom this week. She has a way to teach the kids how to write using stations! Stations are fun at any age! So we focused on letters E and F this week. We had already previously covered them, so I figured it went along with our review idea. He wrote the letters in shaving cream, used straws and pencils and then used play-doh. He has recently learned to make snakes with the play-doh on his own so he figured it out pretty quickly as a way to make the letters.

I didn't have any glass squares like I had seen, but I had flattened marbles, so I let him use those. He did remarkably well. He then got to use stickers to make the letters. He did a pretty good job on it.

We did the letter sheets as well. He liked the first two, but the last one was just a little too much for his attention span. He also did the -at Read 'n' Stick mat and the -at Word House found on The Measured Mom. (Specific links at the bottom.)

As our more advanced math activity this week, we did Roll Dice & Park Cars. I printed the sheet and let him pick the cars he used. After about the first two rolls, I became annoyed with the dice going all over the floor. I remembered a trick I had seen on Pinterest about putting dice in plastic bowls with lids. So that's what I did.

The only problem was I had to take the dice out of the bowl for him to physically count the dots. I don't think he realized he was adding. He recognizes his numbers from 1-20, so I thought this was a good next step. The only difficult thing was that we had to only use one die to get the number 1, but Little Man did fine with it.

Things went well for the week. Then as I was washing bottles one day, Little Man got his step stool and climbed up to "help." He's actually helped me wash the bottles before, but this time, he just wanted to play. At first I was annoyed. It was keeping me from finishing the bottles for the day. But then I realized that he was doing something he needed to do. He needed the sensory time. We have sensory bins with beans and marbles, but I haven't really used water during our playschool time. I always felt it was too messy and he always needed to change clothes and I would be stuck mopping up a sopping floor. Him playing in the bottle basin actually worked out. He didn't get totally wet. I didn't have to mop up the floor.

You may have noticed that Little Man was working at a table. This is new for us. My mom bought him a picnic table so he could do his schoolwork at. He loves it! I purposefully held off doing playschool the day my step-dad was bringing it over because I knew he would want to use it. He sits at it and reads his playschool books. And the first time he played with play-doh on it, he was actually upset when there was play-doh pieces all over it after he cleaned up! It was cute.

I'm still up in the air about this coming week and what we are going to do playschool-wise. It has the holiday Monday and then the next two days we have appointments during our playschool time. So I'm still thinking about it.

Specific Links
Stations at the Kitchen Table (Includes the worksheets Little Man did)
Read 'n' Stick Mats
Word Family Houses Short /a/
Preschool Math Ideas Using Toy Cars (Includes the Roll Dice & Park Cars)