D stands for Donut

A fun idea that I've used each time for D is decorating paper donuts. My kids LOVE being able to play with real sprinkles and I love that the don't have to eat a donuts to do this craft!

Here is my princess decorating her donut. And yes, she wrote the D in the middle.

B stands for Balloon!

Today we learned about the letter B, me and my princess! We learn about the letter, learn the sounds, and learn how to write it. Then, we do a fun craft. I usually come up with the craft during learning about it, or a few minute prior. Yep, that's life with four kids sometimes. Luckily I think I come up with my best and most creative ideas this way.

Today we painted with Balloons. My princess thought it was great! So did the two others, so they joined in on their break!

A little tip that I've learned. You can never have enough craft supplies. I like to buy supplies for crafts throughout the year. A lot of my supplies come from the dollar store. (The red tray is a dollar store buy). This way you can come up with a lot of last minute crafts! Yes, I do have a huge bag of balloons, you never know when you need them!!

Preschool

First, I apologize for my lack of posting. I lost my camera, and post without pictures are not very fun. But the much missed camera has been found and pictures have been taken.

On to the post. Recently I started preschool again with my Princess. She has already been in two co-ops, so it wasn't the first time she's done preschool.

We've been using Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading. I love the book, however I find it a little dry. I like to add a craft when learning all the letters. We do all the letter crafts in one notebook.

Today's letter was U. I Googled umbrella crafts, and there were a ton of examples of the activity we ended up doing. (so I can't really credit it back to a certain person).

After writing the letter U a few times, there are more U's on other pages. We made an umbrella out of a pipe cleaner and a cupcake wrapper. She thought it was great! And it wasn't very messy, so I also thought it was great!

I love book lists!

I don't know a lot about Kumon. I do know that The Boy loooooved Kumon's My First Book of Cutting when we were doing preschool.

And I learned today that Kumon has free downloadable reading lists. I love a good book list, people! There are some great books on these lists. For example, Level 2A includes Penguin, which is one of my favorite children's books ever.

I can't wait to check out the ones I haven't read yet.

Do you guys have any good sources for book lists? I have a billion of them bookmarked, and I know that we probably couldn't even read all of them in our lifetime--but I just love them so.

Learning to Play and Playing to Learn

This is what part of our school day has looked like for the past several days:

And it's awesome. The Boy loves building with LEGOs, and I love seeing how his creations evolve. He learns so much from those little blocks.

When I try to build with LEGOs, all I get is a headache. The Boy can build for hours because he loves it--that's how his brain works. I'm a firm believer that every child has an interest (or two or ten...) that lights them up, and that as parents and teachers, one of the most important things we can do for a child is to let them pursue that passion.

And yes, we still read and do chores and go outside each day. It's not all LEGOs all the time around here, although I'm sure The Boy would be all for that.