Tuesday, July 12, 2011

School

So, I finally got around to doing a structured "school day" - I've only been planning to do this for about a year now!

Last night, as I was tucking Mira into bed, I told her we were going to "do school" in the morning. She got a little worried look on her face and asked, "Welllll, Mommy, are you allowed to go to the school?" We have read a few books that involve the kid going to school, and, of course, no Mommies are present in the pictures. She always notices this when we read the books, so we have explained that Mommies don't get to go to school with kids - they go with other kids and a teacher.

I quickly assured her that we were going to do school at home, and I would be here with her. She still seemed a little concerned, but settled down for bed.

She was very excited to start school this morning  - after I reassured her a few more times that we would do school together. Mira absolutely loved it and enjoyed having lots of scheduled activities. We only spent about an hour and a half today, but the goal is to do two hours, two mornings a week.

So, today we worked in her Diego workbook - she practiced recognizing and circling upper and lower case letters. She did an amazing job - she didn't need any help with finding the letters or circling them!

Then we did worked on some Practical Life Skills: pouring, spooning, and sweeping!

Using a couple of different spoons to scoop dry rice from bowl to bowl.

Very focused!

Pouring



Cleaning up was part of the fun!


I think she would have played with the rice for at least another 20 minutes, but she was so excited to move onto the next activity that she didn't mind putting it away. She did such a great job helping to clean up!

Next, we played a Shape Relay game. We took turns racing down the hall to find a specified assortment of shapes/colors. For example, "run and get 3 squares" or "4 yellow shapes" or "find a green octagon!" It was a little too easy for her since she's known her shapes forever, but it was a good way to keep it fresh on the mind and get some exercise in at the same time. I did include parallelogram and trapezoid, which we didn't spend too much time on before, so those were "sort of" new to her. She has them down perfectly now. She and Kenny are actually playing this game as I type - I guess it was a winner. I'll add some pentagons and hexagons for the next time we play! 


Then we read Corduroy - an old favorite - and did a sequencing activity. She put some scenes from the story in chronological order and then we gave Corduroy a second button for his coveralls.

Proud of her work!

Corduroy activities

We also had snack time and worked on Paint on the computer which served as both our Art and our Technology activity for the day. She is getting better at handling the mouse, but wasn't really impressed with Paint. She kept asking when we were going to "really paint" - oh, well, couldn't win 'em all!

So, overall, it was a huge success, and I'm excited for our next "school day" on Thursday. It may get abbreviated or dissected due to a doctor's appointment, but we'll fit some good stuff in here and there!



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