School Days, School Days

So we are a couple of weeks into Teagan and Tate's home-school, pre-school AND the boys are loving it! I love the curriculum and the program that they are doing and it is most gratifying to see that they are really learning and applying the stuff we learn through out the day. The program comes with everything you need to prepare each days lessons. We do it Mon-Fri from 9am-12pm. I love that it provides structure, not to mention something that we all enjoy doing that is productive and something that is teaching them. The program is from the US. I thought it would be good to incorporate US stuff since that is where we will eventually end up. If we talk about length, then I'm sure to incorporate the Aussie measurements as well (example: meters and feet, km and miles).

Here is a photo of our calendar. The program comes with everything you need to make a calendar each month and tells you how to organize your days. It is so organized yet simple! After we talk about the month and day and let one of the boys put up the date on the calendar, we have the boys go and look at the weather and put up the weather symbol of what it's like outside and then we talk about what kind of clothes you wear for that weather.

There are 1-2 crafts that we do each day. I don't know what to do with all of them. I feel less guilty throwing them away if I take photos of them. I love them, but seriously... I just don't want the papers piling up in a file somewhere. Our house is too small to keep stuff like that.

On Valentines Day we had a Valentine party. We started the day off with a fire drill and then the boys got to play "heart" games, make valentines and hand them out and help make a heart cake (thanks to Joanne's heart cake pan)! We have Eli come once every week to pre-school with us and were excited that the day he came this week, we had a party! The boys made heart place mats to eat their cake. You can see Teagan used every single heart we had cut out and put it on his place mat. Tate only took the two biggest hearts and then he was done. It's funny to see how different they are. I let them paint once and Teagan used only one brush for each color and none of the colors mixed by the time he was done. Tate used one brush and all the colors were 'one' at the end.

This month the boys are learning their address, about dinosaurs, emotions and some various numbers and letters. I can't say enough how impressed I am at how much they are learning in such a short time.