Structure

As a teacher, I know that structure is important to a child's productivity. I didn't apply too much structure to our daily routines this summer and feel that may be partially to blame for the roadblocks I ran into with M's behavior.

Since the outcome of where we will be is still up in the air (don't ask), I didn't enroll M into a part-time preschool. Therefore, I decided to try and work with her in a more structured manner at home. To get my teacher fix, we went to The School Box, and I got a few items for us to use at home. I searched online and found a few different resources I will use to help pace what we do for learning. Thankfully, I am able to tap into several of my teacher boxes for materials and some books. Utilizing the local library for weekly books will also help us defuse the amount of money I will be spending.

Also, I thought I would document what we're doing for my reference and to share with any of you that are interested. I am going to focus on 3 areas: phonemic awareness, math, and life skills. I will build upon the phonemic skills with M's advancement. Math and science skills will intertwine with structured play and cooking. History exploration will relate to the life skills. Of course, we will read books on the different topics and have arts and crafts that relate each day.

I know C doesn't fully understand what we are doing, but if he can color, paint, glitter or just get messy, he's all for it!! I figured he will pick up a lot just from the exposure.

So what have we been working on? This week we are focusing on colors, lacing, and reading lots of ABC books. M has enjoyed the books. C still doesn't have the attention span to listen to more than one book at a time.

We've played file folder games with colors and letter recognition. C was really into the color one since it is all trucks, but he didn't really care about the letters.

We made "Popsicles" out of construction paper and glitter. M painted her first rainbow. We strung colored noodles on yarn and played playdoh.

Here are some pictures of our activities. Enjoy!!
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I had these ABC books in my teacher stash and one was given to us by a friend. Can you guess which one is M's favorite? What about C's?

Marlee making banana bread.

She builds airplanes out of Lego's.

The ABC Matching Game. Marlee did pretty good for our first try.

The color matching game and color counters that they sorted and then played with them.

Blogger does not want me to upload anymore pictures today. So, I will upload the rest of the pictures to this post a little later.

Have a great rest of the week!