Here are the last of the "Tot School" photos. We officially started new school today. It's more of a preschool type setup. I've been gathering lesson plans and ideas from several great books and planning themed weeks. We do lots of fun activities, and seldom pull out worksheets. It's mostly hands-on experience. We're still doing tot school in a way. We're incorporating it into a whole math curriculum using manipulatives and dice. Rylie's been very excited about new school, and she did some activities with her daddy yesterday while I organized our "supply closet." They made a few Christmas ornaments, stamped on paper, and painted using paper bag gloves. See the rocking chair in the background of this photo? It's gone now. :-( We've moved it to our room to get ready for the new baby, and we've replaced the rocking chair corner in Rylie's room with a calendar/school area. It's a little sad, but I'm looking forward to rocking the new baby, and Rylie and I still occasionally go into our room to read books and rock in the rocking chair before nap or bed. Also, Rylie was getting a bit bored with Tot School. That's another reason we moved into a "preschool curriculum". Anyway...here are the last of the tot school photos.
Homemade puzzle...we still use these things in New School....Rylie calls it "new new school."
A skill we still need to work on. Pouring and transferring water.
Matching the baby eggs to their mommies
In preparation for new school, we needed to buy a small piece of furniture. Thank you, Poppy and Plunkie!!! We're using it as our "Theme Table." It houses some things that go along with our themes each week. Rylie was very excited about building it with me. She loves Bob the Builder, so she was very into the whole process. Why wasn't Tripp putting the furniture together? Well, I was doing some serious nesting that night and needed to get it put together ASAP. There really was no deadline, but it my mind, I couldn't rest till it was done, and he happened to be in class that night. Also, I REALLY love doing things like this. Whenever my dad had/has projects to build, I love to get in on the action. Anyway, here's my little helper!
The obligatory First day of School photo. The best thing about preschool? We get to attend in our pj's!
She was a little bit excited. We don't use all of this calendar stuff quite yet. We just do the big calendar right now. We might start doing weather later this week. Today we did calendar time, a morning message, read some books, and I introduced our first theme: the color red.
Here she is going on a scavenger hunt for all things red.
And displaying her goodies. Then we sang a song about red things. We sang it probably 12 times. She likes music. :-)
Finding more red things during our song.
Our second theme of the day: crickets/insects and using a magnifying glass. Here she is observing her pet crickets. We also looked at the other things on the table with the magnifying glass. Then she decided that she wanted to give the acorn to her crickets, so we did that, and luckily no crickets escaped during the process.
This is the top half of our finished building project. This is where we display our weekly themes so that Rylie can look at/play with them at her will. The bottom half is a door. We store our themed books in that part.
Previously mentioned themed books. We collected lots of books about insects from the library!
Reading one of her books to Buster the Dog.
Snack time! We will eat a snack at our school table each day. She's learning to throw her trash away at the end, and it's giving her a chance to drink out of a regular cup.
Our last formal activity of the day was making a red book.
Then we practiced our homemaking skills...laundry. Rylie LOVED laundry time because she gets to "boop" mommy. This just means that she throws unfolded clothes on my head while I fold, and she yells out, "boop!". Then I throw her in the clothes and "boop" clothes on top of her. It's loads and loads of fun. :-) Here she is playing dress up while we fold clothes.
And here she is "booping" with Abbey. Rylie has such a can-do attitude about laundry. She always gets so excited when she sees a pile of clothes and says, "Let's fold these clothes!" She really is a great motivator!
And that's all for today. I'll try to keep posting about how "new school" goes. I think we're going to have a blast. We've got some other fun activities planned this week like scented red paint and spider snacks. Plus, we'll hopefully be going to the pumpkin patch and also the NC State Fair later this month. I'll try to do a better job of updating. AND we are supposed to find out the sex of the baby on Wednesday! Stay tuned...
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