Adventures with BMW and K: PRESCHOOL

This year, we took a break from sending another child to a church preschool. Overall, we have had very positive experiences with our preschools, but I needed a break for many reasons this school year. K would be lonely if W wasn't here and the preschool schedule here would be 9 am - 2 pm and I was NOT going to have it interfere with our nap schedule. One day, I would love to teach preschool so I decided to plan and implement preschool at home this year. So far, it has been absolutely amazing...it has given me a focus for W and K to work on skills, but in a fun way! Here are my lesson plans and some pictures for anyone who would like to use some of the activities. I will be absolutely honest in telling you that I have found most of these things on Pinterest and different blogs AND I try to integrate my reading education background with the themes that I am doing with W and K each week. Sometimes, it works out perfectly, but not always.

Here are my October lesson plans:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxTXGUqfRodzY2RsUGUtOGE1ZUE/view

We start out each lesson with W making his name on his school bus (from September). The letters are attached with Velcro on the school bus windows. I had him just put the letters on in the beginning, but now I mix them up and he puts them on the bus. I will also give him one letter at a time and he has to put it on his school bus in the right order.

Since I was a teacher, I have thousands of books so I read aloud the books to go with our theme and letter of the week. Note: I am NOT a fan of letter of the week for elementary school, but for preschool it works well for us right now. I don't go in ABC order- I try to do it in the order from Words Their Way, but again, it doesn't always work out. I started with the letters in W's name and then have moved on from there. The key is that the letters look different and sound different each week to lessen any confusion. When I introduce a letter, W stamps the lower case letter onto the large upper case letter that I printed out.

Then, I found these awesome letter books from The Measured Mom blog for W to "read" to me. We also make his focus letter using play-doh with letter cookie cutters. I also try to use the color play-doh that we are studying for that month (ex. October was orange and November is brown). We also say and recite our nursery rhyme for the month. Last month, we sang and "read" (pointing to the words and echo reading) "Little Miss Muffet" and this month, it is "Humpty Dumpty." I use the awesome website called Webbing Into Literacy that was developed by one of my professors at UVA to print out the nursery rhyme with pictures. There are also a ton of great activities to do with each rhyme!

For math, we work on our shapes and colors. I use M's preschool teacher's calendars from his two year old class to guide me for shapes and colors (thanks Sharon Smith). I made a big shape in the same color that we are studying for the month to review each day (and laminated it). W loves to tell me his shapes...we pick them out and label them each day.

Then, we work on counting. Right now, I printed and laminated apple tree mats for him to add the apples to using little cotton fuzzies. He loves it!

We count each apple tree and how it coordinates to the number on the mat. I can't remember exactly where I printed these, but I also love the blog Life Over C's and she has some great mats that I have used as well!

Finally, we have our art projects that are an ABSOLUTE blast! K LOVES to paint and she starts screaming when she sees me getting out the art smocks. I let her participate as much as possible and needless to say, art is her favorite! All of my art projects have the links in the lesson plans. Here are our leaf trees from this morning...