Since we finished up all our letters and Mikayla is getting older, I felt it was appropriate to begin preschool with her. If we were living in the states and both working, we would be sending her to a preschool at this age, so why not! This past week we started our journey with one of my favorite books Chicka Chicka Boom Boom. If you have never read it, you should. It is a book about all the letters climbing to the top of a coconut tree, falling out, and starting the climb again. There are also two follow up books we used Chicka Chicka, 123 and Boom Chicka Rock. The first is most similar and about numbers that climb up an apple tree, the second is a book about the numbers on a clock having a good time when no one is looking!
I wanted to start off our first week of preschool with some fun stuff and what is more fun than Chicka Chicka Boom Boom. Next week we will begin with a more structured letter, number, shape approach, but more on that later. For now, here are some of the things we did this week.
Isn’t her little smirk here hilarious?
She is so hard to get an actual smiling picture of!
Journal time. I wanted to incorporate daily journal "writing" into our learning time this year (still not sure how that will look, so I am open for suggestions). I got her this plain composition notebook and let her decorate it with stickers to make it hers and we talked about what it was and how we would be using it.
Chicka Chicka tree hat. She was not as excited about this one as I was. But I thought she looked cute!
Counting with sticks. We did something similar last year with pom poms, but this time I used "coconut sticks" as the counters. She is still not a huge fan of math and really struggles to complete any math activity.
For this week’s journal, I wrote a word and she drew the pictures. Our words for this week were sun, tree, coconut, and letters. On each page I wrote our word for the day and then left a space in case she wanted to practice writing her words (which she never did). I think starting next week I will make one day each week practice writing her name.
Chicka letter match. The tops of the trees were capital letters and the bottoms lowercase letters. She was awesome at this game.
Chicka hand tree – leaves are her hands, trunk is her forearm and then foam letters were used to spell her name.
I gave her free reign on this activity. She got an outline of a coconut tree and her letter stamps and went to town stamping letters all over the tree. We talked about the various letters as she stamped them too.
Special coconut tree snack – apples for leaves, banana for trunk, peanut butter balls for coconuts and butterscotch chips for the sand.
We pretended this paper towel tube was a coconut tree and matched the letters using stickers. This one back fired a little because the stickers kept falling off and it turns out I didn’t actually have a sticker for each letter! Oops!
Coconut investigation. I think this was her favorite activity from the whole week. We cracked open a coconut and used our senses to investigate it. She was not a fan of the taste of a real coconut, but didn’t seem to mind the shredded coconut!
Coconut number match.
Coconut shape tree. First we sorted and identified the different shapes and then glued them together to make a coconut tree. She also really liked this activity.
Like with most weeks we had lots of activities planned for the week that just did not happen. I overestimate the amount of time she will stay focused each day so we end up with activities that don’t get completed. I guess it is better to be over prepared than under prepared! Next week we will start with a Letter of the Week curriculum, but more on that to come.
