Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Preschool for Lu

At the beginning of the school year a couple of friends asked me if I would be interested in a doing a little preschool for our daughters.  It was a bit of a leap of faith for me because I can be really bad at commitments and things I view as stress.  But I said yes.  And I’m so glad I did.  With all the days off with regular school I wind up hosting about once a month (we only do it one day a week, which is PERFECT for me).  Here’s a bit of what I’ve done with the girls so far.

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We do one letter a week.  I brainstorm as many bizarre ideas as I can come up with and then try to narrow it down to one and mix in some normal stuff so I don’t get kicked out of the group.  ;>

For the letter “A” I chose Abstract Art, Apples and Astronomy. (Don’t you think antagonist would have been good?  We could have talked about literary forms and character analysis in literature.  Alas . . .)  We read the coolest book about finding shapes in art (I Spy Shapes in Art by Lucy Micklethwait) and then did letter “A”s Matisse-style. 

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We ate Apples for snack.

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And made star jars (Astronomy) which I forgot to take a picture of.  Basically you poke holes in tinfoil, slip that inside a jar and put a little tealight inside.  It makes a fun night light.

The next week I had was a cancelled trip to the pumpkin patch due to weather, so we just did pumpkin stuff (nothing weird or unusual here).  The girls made pumpkin cookies,

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made pumpkin torn paper collages,

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and read stories to each other.

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Letter “E”came next.  I really wanted to do something with Edgar Degas, Entomology, or Edgar Allan Poe, but I knew I was pushing it with that last one. Instead we went Exploring,

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and made collages of what we found. Can you tell I love collages?

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We played I Spy with our magnifying Eye glasses. And we did a food tasting for snack (more Exploring).

Our most recent adventure was with the letter “H”. By this point I had figured out that anything too out in left field was going right over their heads.  If they couldn’t pronounce it, they couldn’t remember it. (My cast-off words included Hyperbole, Hydrogenate and Hysteria.  Ooo, but Helen Keller would have been good, no?  Ooo and Haiku – that would have been good, too.  So many good words, so little time.)  But I did manage to squeak in Haberdashery!  Yea me!  So “H” was full of Houses, Haberdashery (those silly girls just called them Hats) and Hands.

I cut up a bunch of laminated scrapbook paper into different shapes and put magnets on the back for our road trip in August.  I have pulled them out many times since then to curb boredom.  On this day they worked beautifully for Houses.

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About four years ago I came across an idea for making Hats out of paper plates and bowls in a Strawberry Shortcake craft book.  It’s been filed away for quite some time.  We finally got to make them!

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And lastly, Alyx watched an episode of Pioneer Woman with me where they made Hand cookies (cookies cut out around the actual hands of her guests).  Alyx had been begging me to make them for preschool ever since she saw it.  When I realized I had the letter “H”, I could not pass it up.

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Didn’t those hats turn out ADORABLE?!?  Preschool has been nothing but fun (Well, except the time my baby was screaming her head off until I could get the little girls occupied with something long enough for me to nurse the baby.  And the time I accidentally bumped one of the girls out of her chair and onto the floor.  And the time Alyx and the other girls got into a huge fight over the little trampoline.  Oh, and the time . . .)  I’m so glad I said yes.  ;>

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