School Has Started

I made the decision to keep Alex home another year and do some home school preschool. He still has the opportunity to go to a preschool next year, which he probably will if not for any other reason then to get social interaction and not be shell shocked when it is time for him to enter kindergarten. For the last couple of months I have been researching a planning what I want to do with him. I decided a curriculum based on the alphabet. One letter every week. We will do a little pre-writing, practice counting, do some simple science experiments, read lots of books, review shapes and colors, do arts and crafts, do some fine and gross motor skill activities, explore with sensory play and most of all have fun. They are only young once!

So today was our first day. Alex had fun. "A" is the letter of the week, and today's theme was apples. We started the day with our morning board. I made this for him to use as a visual aid to talk about his name, age, date, weather, seasons, letter of the week, shapes and colors. The pieces all have Velcro so they can be moved and changed around.

He did some pre-writing worksheets from Confessions of a Homeschooler.

We practiced counting with a little game. Alex rolled a big dice and put the number rolled of apples (red pompoms) on the tree.

We made an apple sun catcher. We melted apple colored crayon shavings between wax paper using a iron. I obviously did this part. He then glued the wax paper in the center of a apple shape I cut out of construction paper and it made a beautiful sun catcher.

I made him some play dough using the recipe from Counting Coconuts. I've used this recipe several times and it always comes out great. This time I didn't add any color to it, I just added some cinnamon and it made it a light tan color and it smelled great. We pretended to make apple pie.

He did a directional art gluing activity and made a lower case "a" apple. The idea is from Totally Tots.

In the theme of the day I made him some apple smiles for a snack. They are made with two slices of red apple with the skin on, spread them with peanut butter and some mini marshmallow "teeth" in between. He loved it. I got the idea from Pinterest the original post was from Disneyfamily.com

Lastly, we read a couple of great books about apples. We read Apples, Apples, Apples by Nancy Elizabeth Wallace. 

And The Seasons of Arnold's Apple Tree  by Gail Gibbons.