School Room

All parents are homeschoolers, at least the first few years of their child's life. Since I don't believe strongly in having a school program for preschoolers, I want to show you the activities that I have been encouraging Eli to do as his "school." I leave these activities out so he can easily access them, I do the activities in front of him so he can see how it works, and then I guide him through doing it once by himself. Since the school activities are out in clear view, Eli makes his way to them several times a day. If Kate is sleeping, I usually sit with him whenever he decides to work on those activities.

First, I want to share a few activities that Eli has been working on in July.

My mom got Eli this card game for his birthday. The point of the activity is to play memory, but Eli has been using it for sorting (i.e. animals in one stack, objects in another) or for matching.

Of course, we read every day. Eli's favorites right now are anything by Leslie Patricelli and anything with over-the-top rhyming like all the Dr. Seuss books. My mouth hurts terribly by the time I'm done reading! :)

We are still doing pouring.

Second, I want to show you what our "school room" looks like.

Here you can see how I have set up Eli's "school" space. Right now this is home to his "trays." Week 1 trays: cutting strips of paper (Eli is not quite ready for this yet, so I will remove it next week), coloring, spooning beans, placing erasers in an ice cube tray with tongs (Eli is not quite ready for this either, so I will remove it next week), pouring, and gluing (not pictured)

We especially worked on taking care of our environment, cleaning up after ourselves, and putting our trays away properly.

Week 2 trays: pouring water, coloring, stickers, sorting activity with erasers, sensory tub with rice, buttons, pom poms, and alphabet letters, and gluing.

Here is the up close view of the activities for week 2.

Monday starts week 3. I will keep all of these activities, because they were all developmentally appropriate for Eli. I will increase the intensity of the activities, though. For example, next week I will add more colors to the eraser/sorting activity instead of only having pink and green erasers to sort.

So that's what we did for school this week!