Jesse Bear, What Will You Wear?

Work In Progress

I've got felt ready to make a bear template and clothes to dress our own bear (website). We'll also use the clothes to continue our focus on the seasons.

Blueberries For Sal

Math: This looks like a great activity from Homeschool Share. Used a pail and real blueberries to look at pre-adding/subtracting. Putting 5 in and taking 2 out, how many left...etc. I even tried having five in and taking two out and having him telling me how many are left in the pail without being able to peek. He actually got it right a couple times. I'm impressed, I wasn't sure he'd be able to. Also drop blueberries into bucket and have him count how many "kuplinks" he heard (one-to-one correspondence).

Letter Discovery: Another from Homeschool Share. I'm going to group the letters so he's only matching a few at once and see how many he knows. Than I think we'll make a chart/poster for him to look at of all the pairs for future reference. I would also make sense to focus on the letter B this week, but I haven't quite thought through how I want to put focus on this.

Skills:We'll bake some muffins with our blueberries and share with daddy the sweetness of homeschooling.

Art: I found a cute project on another blog, here's the link, where you draw blueberry bushes and have your child use their finger and blue paint to put on the blueberries. Thanks to all bloggers like this one who give me such inspiration. I hope I can return the favor.

Science: Begin Animal Classification once again with the help of Homeschool Share.

Bible: "I am with you always" Matt. 28:20. Discuss God's protection and safety issues such as Stranger Danger, not wandering off...

The Snowy Day

Our first "row" was The Snowy Day. I had a plan for the week and we didn't accomplish as much as I hoped. However, I still felt like we had a successful week. Since this story focuses on a winter day and since my son is really into discussing seasons lately, we spent a good part of our week learning about the four seasons.

As I progress (as this is definately a learning experience for me too) I would like to add not only the BFIAR aspect to our week but also pre-math skills, letter discovery, Bible and other skills. My goal is give my son experience in each of these areas. Education at this stage in life, I believe, is through experience.

BFIAR: We read through the book several times during the week. The first time through trying to predict what would happen. I was suprised that he knew right away what happened to the snowball in the boy's pocket and that there was a wet spot from the melted snow. During the other reads I stopped to ask him what was happening or what would happen next.

We also put ice cubes in the freezer, fridge, table and coat pocket and predicted which would melt first and than checked back every few minutes to see how it's going.

The book show the boy making tracks in the snow. Thankfully it snowed this week so he could make his own tracks. We also found books about animal tracks. The best one was Whose Footprints? by Yabuuhci.

Bible: Eccesiastes 3:11 "He...made everything...beautiful..."(taken from his cubbies book for AWANA) We focused on the beauty of the seasons. We divided a paper into four sections and drew a leafless tree in each section and labeled each with a season. Each day we discussed the season and added appropriate leaves to the trees. Winter, potato flakes for snow. Spring, pink and green tissue paper using a pencil tip for 3-D. Summer, torn green tissue paper. Fall, red, yellow, orange tissue paper punched with a hole punch and sprinkled on.

Starting Somewhere

As I begin my own journey of homeshooling my preschooler I've used many blogs to help me on the way. I hope that my blog will be just another resource for others to use as well. I hope to share my lesson plans, ideas, the joys we have and the snags we hit.