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.