Hey folks! It's been awhile since our
last homeschool preschool update and it's the same old story: I'm
terrible at sticking to a schedule, we stay on one subject longer
than I mean to because I can literally go a week before thinking
“Hey, we haven't done any school stuff in awhile”, I pick out too
many projects to do, Myka isn't interested in doing some of the
things I find, and the list goes on. To recap, most of our issues
stem from me being a poor planner, in a way, and a poor “sticker to
schedule”. As I've also mentioned in a previous update, thank God
in the state of Indiana you don't have to have your child enrolled in
kindergarten (public or home) until they are 6 years old. This
relieves the hell out of me because I'm clearly not ready and Myka's
not quite there yet either.
Anyways, enough of that. I want to
share some of the fun projects we have
been doing! I don't think I've mentioned this before, but I
participated in a webinar type thing several months ago about
planning and following your child's interests in what you plan for
“school”. I feel like this has made things more fun and
interesting for Myka. (It's been fun for me, too, planning stuff
because it's been subjects I'm interested too!) We started off with
dinosaurs, then did some fall activities, of course, then moved on to
ocean life and have recently started musical instruments after an
“enthralling” episode of Sesame Street sparked her interest. ;)
Ocean
life seems to be a major preschool theme, so we found plenty of
crafts and experiments/activities to do. Admittedly, most of the
science experiments and activities we tried didn't work out like they
were supposed to, but that's ok.
Note: Before I start in
on the pictures, I would just like to apologize ahead of time for
their quality, or lack thereof. I take most of the pictures used in
my posts with my cell phone because let's be honest: It's usually a
lot more readily available than a camera. With that being said, I
recently got a much needed new cell phone (Seriously. It would
randomly freeze up, turn itself off, fun stuff like that.).
Unfortunately, the camera on it isn't great, so I'm still trying to
get used to it. Moral of my longer-than-intended spiel: Sorry the
pictures suck!
Here's
an overall view of our crafty projects on our “school wall”.
(Guess I should get our winter alphabet with the cute snowmen up now,
eh?)
Paper
plate crabs, animals that DO and DO NOT live in the ocean activity,
and hand print octopuses. (The last one was a major hit. It's the
first time we've made anything from her hand prints and she thought
putting paint on her hand was super awesome.)
Paper
plate pufferfish and “make
an ocean”
activity.
Paper
plate seashell. (Seeing a theme here yet? Haha) I'm not gonna lie: I
had Myka paint this while I was in and out of the kitchen to keep her
entertained. When I saw that she had painted it all one color, I was
kind of disappointed. How boring! But once it dried...Wow! It looks a
lot neater in real life.
We
also made sand foam one day, which actually turned out pretty cool.
Other than that, our salt water density experiment didn't work, the
different zones of the ocean in a jar kind of worked (they came out
darker than they should have, therefore hard to differentiate), and
the ocean/foamy sensory bin didn't quite turn out how we wanted...But
I have a habit of making due with what we have on some of these
things and just maybe
didn't read or skimmed over the directions on a lot of them, thinking
“Oh, ok. How hard can it be?” :/
Now
we are on to musical instruments! This also seems to be a popular
“kid theme” as I've found tons of websites on how to make your
own kid-friendly musical instruments! I'm pretty excited about this
theme too because I used to be a band nerd. I was secretly really
pleased when Myka showed an interest in instruments after that
episode of Sesame Street. Those are the few things she and her sister
play well with together too. It's entertaining listening to her and
Ripley bang on their little Barbie piano together in Myka's room. :)
Plus I know they aren't getting into trouble. Mwa ha ha!
So
far we have made some simple homemade instruments and they watched
some YouTube videos on different instruments one morning. (We don't
let her do too much on the computer because she becomes obsessed, but
hey. I figured I may as well let her watch something educational
while I fed the animals. ;) )
Our
happy little sun “shaky shaky” maker. Myka insisted I draw a
grumpy face on the other side, which somehow turned out looking like
an emo girl after she was finished coloring on it. Lol!
I
also made a paper towel roll kazoo which, admittedly, does not work
as well as toilet paper ones AND we didn't have plain wax paper, but
it works. She's also holding up her straw pan flute, or whatever you
want to call it. I'm hoping to FINALLY make a rain stick tomorrow.
I've only been meaning to make one for forever.
What
have you been up to school-wise? Are you taking a break for the
holidays right now?
