Time For Playschool: Our Body: Hands and Feet Day 1

You were worried, weren't you. You thought I had quit and stopped doing school after 4 weeks. (I did consider it). Here's the situation. I applied for a position at a preschool and started yesterday. I shadowed the owner teaching and I will prepare lessons and teach for her on Friday. It's kind of my "trial" to see if I'm any good. And let's be honest, preschool is NOT 4th grade. Sometimes it felt a little like controlling the chaos. But what else do you expect with 3 year olds? It was a LOT of fun and the kids are extremely cute. Spunky, but cute. Brooklyn got to come with me and she LOVED it. It's basically coming down to whether I can commit to next fall. Which depends on if Callen gets this job he is interviewing for. He passed the first interview and goes in on Thursday for the second. We are both hopeful. It would mean so many good things for us in terms of finally having some stability in our lives, something we are both craving.

ANYWAYS, this isn't why you are here. You are here to see some excellent ideas on how to teach your child. And hopefully today will not disappoint. I am having to change our schedule a little to accommodate our new schedule, so Brooklyn will do real preschool on Mon/Weds, and Mommy preschool on Tues/Thurs, with fine motor Fridays staying the same, and the workbook/computer time will be combined to Saturdays. We'll see if I don't burn myself out. Needless to say, Mommy Preschool will be a little less... involved in the future. I am taking out the warm up stuff (days of the week, calendar, weather, etc) since she does that at real preschool.

So today we went straight into the letter and number of the week. (I considered skipping this as well since she does a letter of the week at real school. But since they are on "o", she might need the letters between d and o at some point, so I'll just keep going. Plus, I try to do more of spiral reviews of all the letters we've learned on the second day, which they didn't do at the other school, and I want to continue doing that. Plus it can't possibly hurt to have more one-on-one time with each letter.)

So the letter E. We started with our book. The website I've been getting the books from doesn't have books for the vowels for some reason, just the consonants, so we just did a color page that has several words that start with short e. We talked about the sound and the words and she colored them. Then of course we did our letter path page, followed by tracing and drawing her own Ee's. I didn't get a picture, but she did a KILLER good job today.

Then we practiced counting to 5 and drawing/tracing her 5's. (Remember, I can't find the actual sheet I am using, but these tracing pages look cool and would also work excellently.)

So then we moved on to our theme of the month. We are doing the body this month. I don't want to get too in depth with this, so I figured I would just focus on doing things that utilize different parts of the body. So this week we are using our hands and feet. We did two fun things today with our hands and feet. Well, first we read a book, My Two Hands My Two Feet by Rick Walton. It's a cute little book that you read the first half, My Two Hands, then when you get to the middle, you close it, flip it over, and read My Two Feet.

Then we made some hand/feet molds! You would think it would be super involved, but seriously, it look like 5 minutes, including prep time. So I made the dough, rolled it out into somewhat circles. While Brooklyn was practicing writing her E's, I did Sydney's hand and foot (I just did one hand, one foot on the circle). Then I used a knife and smoothed out the edges of the dough. Then I brought Brooklyn over after we read the book and she did her own hand and foot in her dough. Then we threw it on a pan and into the oven for 3 hours. We'll see how it turns out! I have some different paints, we'll see what we decide to use to cover it when it is dry. I might just leave it white and hang it in her room, or maybe pink. :) We'll see.

Then we decided to make some animals out of paint with our hands and feet. I just googled handprint crafts and looked at all the images. I let her look through them and pick a few she wanted to make and we just looked at the image and made our own! It was super fun! (I'll be honest, I assisted a little more than normal since I have to come up with lesson plans for Friday at real school and I think this would be really fun! And since it is helpful to kids to see a model, I wanted Brooklyn's to turn out somewhat decent so they would know what they are supposed to do). If you look at the frog, that one I did not assist with, except making sure she pressed her hands down all the way. (After I pressed her fingers down, the next time she pressed each of her own fingers down with her other hand, it was really cute). She had a great time and giggled everytime I poured paint on her hands and smeared it around. And in the end, we have 4 super cute ocean animals (Get it, O for Ocean? O is our letter of the week at school). And I love that we incorporated an octopus, which was the animal we focused on yesterday and we put little "o" bubbles for the fish. That's what those are, in case you couldn't tell. :) )