The Plan
Theme: Discussion and book.
Letter A: Introduce Aa and short a sound. Apple tree project.
Sight Words: Introduce in with gross and fine motor activities.
Math: Create 1&2 displays.
Bonus: Draw a picture and print name on front of travel journal. Jack Hartmann

What Actually Happened…

Theme: Discussion and Book
For the past week, I have been talking about going on adventures. I asked the kids what they thought was in the box. “Our animal toys,” Koala answered. I guess I didn’t hide the box well enough, those sneaky kids. After naming all of the objects in the box, we talked about where to find the items. Panda guessed the farm. We talked A LOT about farms. The kids have visited several different farms and a very familiar with barns, farm animals, and tractors. We then read two farm books that we had borrowed from the library. I had the kids color the covers of their travel journals and write their names on them.

Letter Aa: Introduction and Apple Tree
We watched and danced to Jack Hartmann YouTube.  We love Jack Hartmann, he is adorably cheesy and many of his videos have motions with the songs, so the kids are not just watching the video.  Then, the kids searched for the pictures of A words and apple cut outs. We identified the pictures and colored them. Grizzly proceeded to dump out all of the crayons and we lost the arrow for a few minutes, but we finally regrouped. Panda easily guessed that they all began with A, but we practiced the saying the letter A and the short letter a sound, especially Koala. I really sounded out alligator, apple, apricot, and ambulance. We pasted the pictures to the apples, but they were kind of wet, so we will place them on the tree tomorrow.

Sight Word: Gross and Fine Motor Activities
Then we went to our sight word “in.” I simply showed them the word on a notecard.  Once again, Panda was very familiar with the word and was able to identify it before I told him. We clapped, jumped up and down, marched in place, and skipped (well, attempted to skip), while saying “i, n, in.” We then practiced writing in with our finger in the air and on each other’s backs.

Math: Display
Finally, we worked on some math.  I created this simple four-square.  In the first box, the kids wrote the number.  The second, the word.  The third, a drawing (like one circle or two rectangles).  Lastly, the put the number of stickers in the box.  The number 1 was easy for both Panda and Koala to write, but they both struggled with 2. Koala needed a lot of hand-over-hand, even with the dots. Panda struggled a bit as well. Koala’s 1 and Panda’s 2 are shown below:

Overall, we didn’t do too bad for our first day. The kids are excited to do more activities tomorrow.
Note: Honestly, the letter A kind of stinks as an introductory letter. I know some teachers who start with another letter (like m) because the letter A makes all sorts of random sounds. We are focusing on the short a sound so I made the words that began with short a black. The other words (arrow, airplane, acorn) I made red to identify that they were different.

Before I knew it, my oldest would be going to kindergarten. Granted it was still a year off, but I was kind of freaking out. I really want to be the parent that doesn’t worry about her kids learning everything before they go to school, but I also really want my kids to have a great educational base before they enter kindergarten. I wanted them to have free unstructured play to support their curiosities, but I also wanted some structured, methodical school time. I really wanted to teach my children, but I didn’t really want to put too much time into creating lessons. I really didn’t want to freak out over this, but that is so not my nature😉, so I created what I call preschool LITE. I chose one adventure to take every 2 weeks. Most of these lessons will take about 30-60 minutes/day and will cover 4 days a week. Why only 4 days? We tend to be busy or seriously cranky at least one day a week, so I only plan on having 4 good days. The lessons can be done in one solid period or broken up throughout the day. Since I have three different kids at different ages, I have tweaked some of the activities so that everyone could participate. I tried to use materials that we had around the house and I could whip up without too much prep time. We also have one special skills that we focus on every week that will help us in kindergarten; such as sharing, washing hands, etc.… Mostly these skills are taught throughout the day with gentle reminders.