This week is “L” week for Keagan. Our main theme the week is leaves. I don’t schedule a ton of activities for Keagan, as I believe in child-led learning, especially at a young age, however, I plan a simple activity each day.
This week’s plans:
Today Leaf Rubbings (already done, he loved it!)
Wed: Leaf Walk, collect leaves for the rest of the week and talk about them, their colors, the autumn, etc
Thurs: Leaf collage
Fri: Tree activity, I’ll cut the base of a tree out and let him glue leaves on the top.
I skipped Monday, we had playgroup and afterward he ended up at the hospital (that’s my next post!) so we took the day off.
At some point, we’ll make a collage for L, we do one for each letter (cut things out of magazines that start with our letter for the week and Keagan glues them…. he doesn’t want to cut yet)
We may also make a Lion mask, depending on his interest, and we will read some lion books and talk about them a bit.
As we go through our days, I make an extra point to read books that fit with out theme, write the letter of the week on paper before he colors on it, find coloring sheets in his books that fit the theme, etc as well as talk about anything he finds interest in related to the theme. When there’s a good opportunity, we take a “field trip” like the leaf walk. We went to the pet store and bought a fish on “F” week and went to an apple orchard on “A” week etc. I don’t do the letters in order to make all of this easier. I am saving “C” for Christmastime and we’ll do “H” the week of Halloween, “T” the week of Thanksgiving. We’re going to do “Z” soon since I can’t think of any field trip other than the zoo for it and it’s going to be too nasty to go to the zoo soon, but we’ll run out of letters before the weather is nice again. I am saving “S” for when there is snow, but that will have to come without plan, since snow is hit or miss around here most years. If nothing else, I’ll save it for a planned trip to the mountains.
Anyway, there’s the rough idea of how we do “preschool.” Keagan likes these activities and the theme really helps to motivate me as much as teach him. We have a lot of fun together doing these things and because it’s flexible, it is very easy to work around Eden.
love it. I wish I had the motivation to do something like this with Allison. Maybe when we get moved and life settles down, huh?