Preparations

So I spent time earlier in the summer gathering materials and making lists of lessons I want to do this year.  I think I've put together a great start to a program for Carolyn for this year.  But when we started this week, I realize I had forgotten to organize the projects into complete sets.  So with both kids out of the house this morning (at the store with Dad), I set to work.  I now have a plan and sets to get started in every subject.  Here's what I did today:
Math - cut out 5 gingerbread men, made notes for needs for first 5 lessons for manipulatives
Social Studies - drew patterns for Carolyn to cut out tree pieces to make family tree
Science - thought about more activities to do live make hand/foot prints as we talk about each of those
Writing/reading - made templates for art projects - already had apples printed, decided on cotton ball black sheep, made grandfather clock template for cutting, made dog and bone template, made engine 9 template

This didn't take me too long either, which is nice.  Only about 45 minutes and I have the first 5 lessons of everything but social studies put together.  The next unit for SS will likely involve more field trips than crafts since it's community helpers.  I'm thinking I'll wait until Jon goes back to work before figuring that out.  But the unit will likely take a while.  I'm thinking we'll start at the library and talk about all the helpers there, we're visiting the doctor 8/31 for James' collar bone follow-up.  They go to the store each week.  Maybe we'll go to the post office to buy stamps, and try to see if we can visit the firehouse and police station.  I think that's a good variety of places.  If anyone is around and wants to join us for the police station and/or firehouse, let me know.  We'll be going on a Tues/Fri most likely, unless we go early in the year before soccer and story hour start up.

Having put all this together, I'm pretty excited to keep working with Carolyn.  As we go I think she's going to enjoy all the different thing we'll be doing.  She already likes reading her "preschool" books and getting to spend special time with me.  So here's to a great year with hopefully minimal arguing over school stuff. 

Yesterday we read all 3 family books I had found, then discovered I didn't have the family tree ready to work on or the ginger bread men cut out for the first math lesson.  So she listened to a book on CD and then we read some more, then she just looked through some of the preschool books we will read.  Did I tell you she's excited and a total bookworm?