Our first month of preschool is done. It’s been great and very worth doing. I mostly wanted to post a few highlight pictures, but also say that if you are looking for activities to do with toddlers, you should definitely check out the Preschool Alphabet blog. You wouldn’t have to use it as a 5 days-a-week if you don’t want to….you could pick one day a week to do it, or, you could go through the alphabet daily instead of weekly, you can do whatever you want. There is definitely some prep involved, but as minimal as you can get for planning 2-3 hours worth of activities for 2 kids every day. It’s worth it to me, especially because I really enjoy that kind of thing.
Shoot. I just realized that pictures from B week are on my mom’s camera. She was here that week to watch the boys my two work days while we transitioned between babysitters. We did some fun stuff that week: Buttons, Bears, Bugs, Bubbles and Birds. Bear day was probably the day they had the most fun, especially with this Going on a Bear Hunt video, and a book scavenger hunt I did using bear footprints (cut out of construction paper) as clues. I still have the shortcut to the video on the desktop and pull it up every few days when they need to get their wiggles out. They love it every single time. In fact, here they are doing it with friends on a play date yesterday:
I am having a hard time mentally getting past the fact that I don’t have B pictures to show and will have to skip to C. C’mon Nikki, you can do it!
Deep breath. Okay, here’s some C stuff!
C is for “Colors”. This was a really fun day. Here, they are going through Thatcher’s room and finding items that match the color of the circles (laminated circles of construction paper that I wrote the name of the color on). Thatcher mostly arbitrarily put toys on circles, but they both had fun with it. We did it a couple times throughout the day, in different rooms and with different toys.
Same day (don’t be confused by the “r is for rainbow” on the paper, it was the best printable I could find. They can’t read anyway). Thatcher is gluing! I had no idea he could do that, but apparently he can. Although, he also ate a few fruit loops that he had already glued down, so lets not give him too much credit.
Still the same day! We put some broken crayons in a muffin tin to make new crayons. They loved this! When they cooled off, I gave them each a handful and put them inside the boxes for our new car seats. They just sat inside and colored. They were so happy (and contained) in there, that I just handed them their lunch plates eventually. The boxes were played with for a solid week before I got sick of them always being in my way.
New day: Clouds!
Duck day! We went to a spot along the river path where I was sure we would see ducks, called THE DUCK POND, where apparently, you are not allowed to feed the ducks. Thanks a lot Eugene. We walked around a bit looking for a different spot, gave up and went back to the truck, when what did I spy? A bunch of ducks in the parking lot. Take that, Eugene, so signs there.
Look closely, and you will see that they are both eating stale duck bread. Nice, guys.
Dot day! There were lots of fun dot ideas. Gotta have bingo daubers on dot day. Thatcher loved the daubers, mostly twisting the lids off and on and rubbing the ink all over his body. Thad used them properly. We came across one of my favorite library books so far called “Press Here”, a fun, interactive dot book.
And finally: another fun D day, Dinosaur day!
Lots of playing with dinosaurs
Roaring like dinosaurs
Coloring dinosaur pictures
Making dinosaur tracks and fossils in play doh
Sticking dinosaurs headfirst into chunks of play doh
Running around with dinosaur feet
And, of course, rescuing dinosaurs that had been frozen in ice
So hopefully that kind of gives you an idea of the awesomeness of this website. So many ideas for fun and interesting days. Mostly it’s play. Lots of book reading, lots of crafts, but mostly just new and different ways to play and keep them engaged. It does take some planning, but mostly that just means that I get things I already have together so that I am not searching around the day of. There is also some printing (and laminating, booyah), and lots of book searches at the library. But, again, I like that planning and organizing, and really, you could do as little or as much of that as you want.
I do try to make some parts of the day a little more official, so I start each morning the same way. I move our kid table to a central spot by the kitchen, ring a sweet old bell that my Great Great Grandma used to teach school in the late 1800’s (borrowing it from my mom). The boys come running (and screaming) when I ring the bell, and we start by reading a devotional from their daily devotional book, and reading through our memory verse for the week. Then Thad practices writing the letter of the day, and writing his name. He’s made a huge amount of progress in the last month, going from writing THAD only, all in uppercase, to:
Not bad. Poor kid has a serious name. Anyway, there is an update on our fake school that we have been working on for the last month. We will be taking a break from the alphabet to do a week’s worth of fall activities. Next up: I still haven’t posted the boys bedroom updates! It’s coming.
Have a happy Sunday!
