Preschool Corner # 4 ~ More Math & Even Some Reading

We had another bumper week with K5's Preschool, I'm not sure what has come over her, she is begging for her school stuff and is powering along.

This week she finished off the last 5 lessons in the 1st Singapore Math Preschool Book, these lessons included:

• Counting Orally
• Arranging Numbers in Sequence
• The conversation of Number
• Ordering according to size
• Ordering according to capacity
• Visual judgement of sizes of different containers
• Finding capacity by counting
• Awareness of heavy and light
• Comparing heavier and lighter
• Awareness that weight is not necessarily related to size
  
  

Working with volume, this lesson alone she worked at for nearly an hour. It was so hands on and so wet, two of her favourite things to do (getting wet and doing pretty much anything hands on)

Discussing lighter and heavier.

Trying out an assortment of things in the scales, relating to lighter and heavier.

Making patterns of 5 with square pieces of paper. This was to visualise that the same number of things can look very different in a group. (the conversation of number).

She also started the 2nd Singapore Math Preschool Book and finished the 1st lessons from that, which covered:

• Recognition of solid shapes: sphere, cube, cone, cylinder
• Reading & Writing nummerals: 1, 2, 3, 4
  

Tracing and writing numbers.



And we both had a grin from ear to ear when she picked up some readers and read them!!



I got these from the last Lifeline Bookfest for 50c (that's about all they worth IMO). Their not the best of readers, just very simple sight word introduction. Once the child has been shown what the 'special' words are (in the top corner of each book cover) and the first sentence of the first page they can pretty much read the whole book. Each of these (5 in total) were read every day this week.

They certainly gave her a wonderful boost and it surely must of been a really nice feeling to know that she could read and that it really isn't that hard afterall. So if nothing else at least these little books gave her that.






This is another Aldi special, I think I paid around $6 for it. Basically you need to match up 3 puzzle pieces with a cause and an effect. For example, there is a puzzle piece with a plain white tshirt on it, one with some paints on a palette and then another with the same white shirt but it is covered in the exact paint colours from the other puzzle piece.




Some of these are very easy and some a little tricky, probably more so because some of the pictures are a little hard (for a 5 year old) to distinguish exactly what they are supposed to be. She did 3 or 4 at a time so as not to be overwhelmed with all of those puzzle pieces in front of her.



I am sure that I have mentioned before that K5 also attends a community preschool/kindergarten 2 days a week. I asked her to draw me a special picture this week and here it is for your viewing pleasure *grin*

Our little family, mum, dad, K5, B7, C1 and the dog. B7 really wasn't impressed that he had no arms LOL!

She also completed this cool spray bottle painting (and was covered head to toe in paint I might add!!). I love it and am thinking that these paintings would make great wrapping paper. We have tried to paint our own wrapping paper before with stamps but it just seems to take forever to get even just a few pieces completed. This way I could peg a bunch to the fence, give the kids various bottles of watered down paint and off they go...plus it's loads of fun too boot!

We headed to our local show on Friday night, the kids were eager to see how they went with their entries. Just seeing their work on display was exciting and noticing other people admiring what they had created was cool.

**Sorry really bad photography ahead**

So of course you can imagine the grin when K5 saw that she had won 2nd Prize for her Lego House entry.

It's quite difficult to see here as they put everything behind cages, away from touching fingers. I will try and get a post about the show on our family blog inthe next couple of days and will include a clearer photo.

She had her first ride on a super dooper fast fair ground ride. I was a little worried for her at first but she loved it! She's such a daredevil and B7 went on the whizzer the first time when he was 5 and enjoyed it also. DH said that as soon as it stopped all she wanted to do was go again.

Getting finger printed from the local police. Or should I say hand printed, these guys this year decided to do her whole hand, what ever happened to FINGER PRINTING!

And she was a fantastic big sister and held on to her little brother the whole way for him to enjoy his first fairground/merry go round ride.

We had another great week of Preschool (even if I am a little late at posting). Hop on over to Homeschool Creations to see what everyone else got up to this week in their Preschool Corner.

Preschool Corner: Bumper Math & Writing Week

How often have you had to ask your kids to put their school work away because they've done enough for today? Seriously, how often do we do that? This week K5 just couldn't get enough of what she calls 'school work', meaning her maths book.

I have had the Singapore Maths Preschool Books here for ages B7 did the 2nd part of the four book program when I brought him home from school so back then I purchased all four thinking that K5 would do them. However I'm not a huge advocate of littlies sitting down to do book work, they have so many years of it that I have never actually pulled them down off the shelf. K5 has always been aware that they were there as she has a magazine folder full of various sticker and activity books and the Maths books are in there.

This week was the week, she decided that she would get the first one down. Granted that the first six or so lessons are pretty basic stuff and most of the topics covered an average 3 year old would know but she powered through 12 lessons, yes 12 lessons (there are only 18 in the book) in a week. I'm sitting there saying to her, "Don't you think you've done enough for today?", "No mum, just one page!".

Those lessons covered the following topics:

• Same/Different


• Matching


• Things That Don't Belong


• Small/Smaller ~ Big/Bigger


• Colour Matching


• Short/Long ~ Shorter/Longer


• Tall/Short


• Classifying Objects


• 1:1 Counting to 5


• More Than/Less Than


• Number/Numeral Recognition to 5


• Graphs
  
  

She is a little creating machine and like most girls I guess loves all things crafty. If I am looking for K5 then I will generally either find her out in the garden (see photo below) or down in library creating.

This week she made her teddy an airplane. B7 helped her with the wings and tail.

It's father's day here in Australia this weekend so we've also been busy creating for that. I don't have alot of photo's as everything has been wrapped already. We did stenciling on a shirt with our homeschool group though, hope he likes his new singlets! And hopefully he won't stop by here between now and Sunday.


Here's our little garden girl, dressed in all her glory. Gumboots, tutu and a tweety bird shirt that is about 2 sizes too big and yes she hasn't even brushed her hair. If I let her this is what she would do every day of the week...she'd be out of the house down in garden before even having breakfast. You know she really won't like this photo in years to come!!



You'd think after all of that maths work she powered through this week that she would have had enough but no, next on the agenda was writing and lots of it. She completed a few different cards and pictures for dad and wrote on all of them plus she wanted to write a letter to her very dear friend (that has returned to school this year and she misses her terribly).





When I say write I mean write, not just draw a picture, decorate it with stickers, put it an envelope and mail it off. She really wanted to write a letter, granted the most she has ever written is her name. As you can imagine I was totally chuffed when she chose to do this all on her own.





This has to be one of the highlights of homeschooling, it's kind of like missing out on seeing your child take their first steps, all those things that parents miss when they send their kids to school is amazing. She had a grin from ear to ear when she'd finished and realised that she had written a genuine letter.




She used our portable writing center, which has name labels for quite a lot of the people the kids would choose to write to. I just need to add everyone's photo's to the front so the non readers in the house can easily identify the name they are looking for.




She started this piece with Oil Pastels in our homeschool co-op art class, it was a huge task for all of the kids to undertake and it took a few more days of work to finish it off.




They look great on the wall though.

This was a huge week for our Preschool Corner. Wanna see what other preschoolers got up to this week? Check out Home School Creations.