Pre-K with Katie - January

This is the last several months I'll have Katie home all day with me.  Hard to believe that in August she'll head off to kindergarten.  

This month, much time was spent playing with new Christmas toys.  The "animal bucket" got a new infusion of creatures.  She's starting to get the names of various animals.  Yesterday, she was showing me a puzzle, and knew giraffe and elephant on her own.

Both girls have been playing with their Leap Pads (Katie got Hannah's old one, which was originally Jack's, and Hannah got a new one).  I'm surprised (and a little concerned!) how fast they've picked it up and how completely absorbed in their screens they can get.

These wooden disks are good for matching.  Josiah and I played memory with them while they were out.  Katie is working on identifying these animals.

The girls got baby animals from family in Nevada.  It's good to see them nurturing.  They don't play with dolls very often, and it occurs to me that they don't have the life experience of watching a Mommy care for a newborn.  What kid wants to play "nanny"?

I've been having Katie work on a lot of tracing projects, both letters and shapes.

I'm really liking the magnetic Tugu blocks Katie got for Christmas.  The girls have made various creations from them, including spinning propellers, and these lovely triangles.

Katie recognizes "K for Katie!" everywhere, including the end of the word "duck" recently, but we're still working on the other letters.  I'm trying to create a letter rich environment for her, to help her pick up some of the other ones.  This activity was matching capitol letters and lowercase letters to each other.

I recently bought letter cookies at Trader Joe's for the girls' lunches--but the big kids ate the rest after the little girls got one serving!

I try to be pretty selective about what I print off the 'net, because I don't want to end up with a bunch of stuff we don't use, but I stumbled across a winner recently.  I've got AB pattern dots on one side, and ABC pattern dots on the other side in a page protector.  She can use these with bears, buttons, mini blocks, and pouch lids.  We're working, not only on matching colors, but also on what comes next in the pattern.

Using up more Kumon pages left over from Jack's preschool years.

Honestly, I really like having Hannah home from school, and it's nice to have her around for a whole 6 weeks, but sometimes Katie has a hard time sharing or not being The Boss, so I need to separate the two of them for a little while.  Often, I'll call Katie into the school room to read books or do puzzles until she's ready to try again.

We're working on a new art program for review, and one of the tasks was to paint a color wheel.  Katie and Hannah joined us for this.  This was the first time I had Katie paint, and she did great.

Shortly after Katie came home from China, we reviewed for Fundanoodle.  Some of the pages, Katie wasn't ready for at the time, but they're just right for her now.  She especially likes putting the sticker on at the end of each page.

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