Preschool Enrichment Program 2009

My oldest is a sweet, funny, precocious child who has known her alphabet for at least two years now, knows most of the letter sounds, knows all of the primary colors and what colors they combine to make AND what colors those colors combine to make, and can count as high as 100--although for some reason she forgets 14! And, because of a fall birthday, she is just now starting her first of two years of preschool! When I signed her up for preschool at the end of the last school year, I took a glance at the curriculum: social skills, sharing, colors, shapes, etc. They don't even get to letters until next year; I'm pretty sure she'll be reading before next year! So I decided that a little preschool enrichment will be needed. It's actually an idea I had at the beginning of the 2008-2009 school year, but it always sounded like too much work, so I ignored it. A few weeks ago, I grabbed a piece of notebook paper and a pen, and spent all of 10 minutes planning out basically the entire year. It was a breeze!

When planning, I thought of several categories we could focus on: counting, reading, and writing numbers; art; nature; literacy; and writing. Since she has preschool 3 days a week, we'll do short activities on school days (workbooks, going to the library, etc.) and longer activities (nature walks, art projects, etc.) on her free days.

It hasn't gone like clockwork yet. I've actually met with some resistance (Who doesn't want to go for a walk? My kids, apparently!) and a little bit of short attention span-itis. And some days it just doesn't happen at all. But it's been fun, and I feel like she's learning and having a good time.

Here are some highlights so far:

• We got the book Time to Get Up, Time to Go by David Milgram from the library. It is adorable and everyone should go check it out from their library right now! To go along with the book, we made our own version! I folded 3 pieces of white computer paper and 1 sheet of red construction paper in half, and stapled them together like a book. Then I let me daughter choose what activity went on each page. Our book includes time to eat breakfast, time to get dressed, time to do something fun, time to take a walk, time to eat lunch, and time to take a nap. I wrote the "Time to ___________" at the top and she was supposed to draw a corresponding picture. This is one of the times that it didn't quite happen. Oh well!

• Wiki Stix letters from Let's Explore
• We were supposed to take a walk and do a "Colors of Nature" scavenger hunt. Neither child would cooperate, so we did it in the backyard instead. For 5 minutes. And then it started raining. But, it was a good idea! I took a plain white gift bag with handles and colored a spot on it in each of 8 colors (I just did the standard crayola marker colors). Then I wrote the name of each color next to it. The goal was to find at least one object in each color. We managed to find green, yellow, brown, and black. We took all of the objects out of the bag and set them next to the right color spot and name.

• Potato printing (which quickly devolved into finger-painting) from Domesticali via The Crafty Crow

Can't really be annoyed about this outcome!

• Uppercase letter tracing and writing from a workbook. If you don't have a workbook, here's a link to some you can print out.

There's more to come! I actually find projects faster than we can do them!