Friday, September 21, 2012

Following the Plan Friday; the Letter E

It's Friday again!

Big deep breath!

I don't know about you, but I feel like I'm meeting myself coming and going lately.  I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that my older son has been needing a lot of help with his schoolwork lately, which we do while the little boys are sleeping, which means that I don't get that quiet time to get my busy work done.  So I am running behind on a lot of "home prep" things right now.  But, must remember priorities, right?  Even though oldest son would rather I just forget the division ;)

Unfortunately, I think some of this has spilled over into Preschool and I haven't been as organized lately.  Jason told me this week that Preschool was boring (ooops!)  Now, I know this is normal, and I also believe that kids have to learn that life isn't always fun, but I am going to make an effort to catch-up on things and be "available and hands-on" again.

This week was E week.  We did not do an Exercise and Energy day this week; we had to do some major grocery shopping that day instead.  I offered Jason some worksheets to do on his own and he refused.  We also didn't get to the story of Queen Esther as Friday is a longer chapel day and then the boys wanted to play some educational computer games.  Hey, it worked ;)

After all that negativity, I will tell you that we had a lot of fun with Egg Day.  The boys love playing "Find the Item", so hiding the eggs was a big hit.  We played several rounds with everyone getting to hid the eggs.  Jason was a master at hiding the eggs; he hid them in some tough spots!  Justin (2 1/2) was so funny because he would hide all of the eggs in the same place, then he would get all excited and lead us to the hidden eggs.

The boys enjoyed making a nest and putting eggs into it.
We also enjoyed Elephant day.  I printed out a colored elephants from Confessions of a Homeschooler and cut each one up into two or three pieces, each in a different way.  Then I gave them to Jason to put together.  It was very challenging and he did an excellent job!

Another thing he did was a color by number page.  I was so impressed by his coloring and how it has really improved.  He tries very hard to stay in the lines.  He's so cute because he sticks his tongue out when he concentrates.  I really wanted a picture, but I had to get too close and then he would notice and stop.




One thing that I wanted to point out, and that you can see by looking at these pictures, is that you don't always have to have the exact materials listed to do a specific project. 

This past week I had absolutely no money to buy materials, so I had to use what I had on-hand.  The instructions for the nest project includes making a bird out of feathers.  I didn't have any feathers, so I just printed a bird from the computer.

When we did Elephant day, I did not have do-a-dot markers or pom-poms for the "E is for Elephant" page.  I searched around and found those disks in Tyler's Math manipulative bag that we get from his school.  They were a little big, but did the job.  I also found some left-over stickers that had elephants in them, so I had Jason put an elephant sticker into each dot.  He was able to get fine motor skill training by peeling and placing the stickers.

So, don't automatically throw out a project if you don't have the extra materials.  Look and see if you can substitute something else.













Next week we are doing a review week.  We are going to revisit some loved activities and do lots of review work.  See ya next week!

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