My oldest wasn't the only one starting school the other day, my little girl did too! She turns five at the end of October and has another year before Kindergarten, so on Tuesday she started Pre-K at home!
I surprised her with a backpack in the morning and had her first day of school outfit ready to go! (minus white tights, had to go with black) The princess backpack was SP's when she was in preschool, but was almost never used so it was practically new and Babydoll loved it! She was proud to wear her little backpack down to the bus stop when SP left for school that morning.
After getting big sister on the bus, the rest of us headed back home to start our day, which was surprisingly busy considering I had taken the day off. I currently do not have any other preschoolers than Babydoll, and Little Man is too young to get into themes enough to make it personally worth it for me to whip out all my curriculum this year, so we're doing things differently this year. I bought this workbook to do with her, along with all of my preschool games, learning centers, books, and supplies! We're forgoing themes for this school year and focusing on literacy and early math skills. She absolutely loves her workbook and we've enjoyed our time working on all of it together so far.
As soon as we got home from the bus stop on the first day, she raced to the table, pulled out her workbook (which we'd already started working on in the last few weeks) and picked up where she left off in the math section.
After we did math, I had her do a first day of school writing sample for me, copying the uppercase and lowercase letters onto writing paper. We will compare that to writing samples later in the year, and then again at the end, so she can see how far she's coming.
Also we've been reading
Bob Books, Set 1 for Beginning Readers. They start very simple with only 4 letters used throughout the story, and use word families like "at" and "am" words. The first book is called Mat and is about Mat and Sam. Each book introduces a couple new letters thrown in there and a sight word or two (like "the"). At first, a couple weeks ago, I was getting frustrated with her because she was taking wild guesses at what the word says (relying only on the pictures to guess), but with some encouragement and advice from friends we kept at it and she's gotten better at slowing down and sounding things out. Why is it that teaching our own children can be so much harder than teaching other children? I think I sometimes have higher expectations or hopes for them and get frustrated when I think they could reach them but don't as quickly as I think. Something to work on for Mom too!
Little Man likes preschool too! We were practicing letter names and sounds today, among other things, and I think it made him feel like such a big boy! He can only handle a couple minutes at a time, but that's normal for a 2-year-old. He's even started asking for preschool - a couple times today he ran up to me and asked, "Pee-cool?" with a big smile, it was pretty cute!
Sweet Pea had a great first day, has made a couple new friends, and so far has no complaints about any of it!
We're looking forward to a great year!!
