Preschool Corner: Bugs & Creepy Crawlies

I've also been keeping up with Jolanthe's Preschool Corner for a while now and since I decided to join in with Tot School I thought why not also tag along with the Preschool Corner, since I have a preschooler in the house as well.

Just a quick note for any US readers (in case you aren't already aware) we are back to front here in Oz, our Preschool (now called Prep) is generally the year prior to school (and the year prior to that is kindergarten) but I guess really any child from 3 years and up can technically be called a 'preschooler' hey!

It may become a bit too much to do both Tot School and Preschool Corner and any other stuff I might want to post about all in one week so I may end up alternating between Tot School and Preschool Corner....see how I go.

Here is my first Preschool Corner:

Another busy week for K5, as is every week for her. She attends a local Community Preschool two days a week, we have our Homeschool Network Cooperative activities on one day a week so technically that only gives us two days in the school week for preschool activities. And they are always full, let me tell you.

We had a Bug Presentation this week with our homeschool group, I'll be posting soon about everythng we've being doing with bugs, insects and creepy crawlies.

Cafe's is always a favourite activity for K5, she spends a great deal of time preparing her cafe before B7, C1 and I go there for lunch or a snack. Next time though I am going to start introducing the use of money. We've written menu's and things before and 'played' with cash and paying for our food. But Kendra over at Aussie Pumpkin Patch has turned the simple play cafe into a fully fledged lesson on money. It will suit both K5 and K7 as they can easily work at their own levels. Oh you must check out her felt food, isn't it just gorgeous!

She loved the rockpools, so much to see, so many little nook and crannies to explore and all of those little creatures.

We are currently focusing on 3 letters at a time for sound letter recognition, but will (depending on K5) spend 2 -3 weeks on them. That's not to say that we abandon all other letter/sound recognition, we are always talking about words and the sounds letters make. We've just chosen, for our Preschool Time, to focus purely on a few letters at a time.

Currently it is f, b, m, because we use Explode The Code and that is the order in which they introduce the letters. At this stage I've chosen not to do most of the writing activities and we mainly work orally for letter sound recognition. At times she'll ask to write and/or do worksheets so I always have them on hand for when the desire strikes.

We made a fluffly F, painted a miniature fairy model and made a fairy with a pink ginham outfit. K5 also played with her fridge phonics and we read the 'm' book from the Alpha Tales series. Jolanthe spurred me to make up some beginning sounds sheets (instead of spending hours looking through magazines). I used clip art and printed a sheet per letter. I made a quick scrapbook of sorts with my trusty binding machine (couldn't live without that now).

I gave K5 a tray with the scrapbook (I had stuck in the letters f, b, m on the appropriate pages), some letter stickers, letter stamps and all of the clip art images already cut up. She worked on this over a few days going through the images and choosing the beginning sound page to glue them to. We'll keep going with this until she has completed her own alphabet scrapbook that she can look back over when ever she likes. It also gave us many opportunities to discuss things about the various images. Like Mittens, we don't generally have those here in Australia and Moose was another that came to mind.

Make sure you visit Homeschool creations and check out the other Preschool posts.