Whats been going on in Pre School?

The end of our "Apples and Empathy" unit....

Fun fall art projects!

Bodacious Bible lessons!

Marvelous math activities!

Awesome alphabet lessons!

We are now working in our non-fiction unit "All About Books."  Kate is taking us through writers workshop lessons which are completely awesome!  We began by creating webs of things at which we are experts.  Kate used our farm field trip as an example since all of the kids had background knowledge from the trip.  Our first mini lesson was the expert web and then how to "write" our stories as authors of non-fiction.  We learned how to use the super cool line on the paper and begin "writing" at the smiley face.  We learned to draw our illustrations the best we can and then to move on (even if it doesn't look quite like we wanted it too.)  Our second mini-lesson concentrated on how to decide if we wanted to add to our current writing or if we wanted to start a new piece of writing.  After each mini-lesson we break up into "mommy and me" partners to work.  Its very interesting doing this type of work with this age group.  They are capable of so much, but have VERY short attention spans.  Quite different than working with 5 and 6 year olds using the same techniques.  Of course the beauty of home school is each individual child working at his or her own pace.  They are never pressured to do something they are not ready to do, only encouraged to try new things.  It is absolutely wonderful and I praise God for the opportunity to do this.  Future lessons will include using the stapler to add pages to our books (Jamie is super excited about this one!) and labeling our illustrations.  Thanks Kate for all your hard work!

Math... We started off this unit giving a baseline kindergarten math assessment to the kids.  (It is the assessment harford county uses.... x-harford county teachers = good ideas!)  I was once again in awe of these tiny people and their capabilities.  They are already doing what a lot of 5 year olds are learning in public school kindergarten.  Kate gathered the info and graphed it!!!! We now know right where our babies are and what they need to move forward.  Seriously who needs "regular" school when we have this!  God is so good!  So we are diving into geometry with shape study.  Our kids can already identify shapes so we are tackling attributes.  All the mommies brought their stash of shape activities from home and we put together folders with sheets to record how the kiddos do on each activity.  We are doing a quick mini-lesson and then getting into partners to work on activities.  Kate's genius once again!!!!  Hope we don't just stare blankly at each other when baby girl is born!  We will miss you Kate!

This group rocks and so does Jesus!