The Heart

Went to the library today and loaded up on preschool books.  And by that I mean books that fit into the curriculum I've developed.  Carolyn is very excited about the idea of doing "preschool" and I'm enjoying feeding into that.  She also chose princesses as her topic - again.  I think we may have already ready all of those that we brought home.  The library was fun and we worked on vocabulary and a bit of alphabet order while there.  They have flash cards with pictures and words.  James took those out initially and was going through them with Jon.  He got bored and Carolyn took over.  Once she got bored of identifying the objects, I took out 5 pictures and we tried to order them alphabetically.  I realized I start a little too difficultly by selecting 5 cards at random.  So I went back and chose words with A-E and we put those in order.  She got bored part way through F-J.  Something to think about another time we go as a family.  Or maybe even a game we could recreate at home with pictures from magazines with words on notecards.  Although I'm torn as to how important being able to order letters is.  It doesn't help you read, but it does help make sense of the world.

While James was still sleeping, we completed our first preschool activities.  First we read a book about the human body.  It was a really cool book and one I am almost thinking about buying.  Simple, but provides a lot of facts, and some cool effects with holding a page up to light.  Carolyn really enjoyed reading it.  Afterwards, I wanted to the heart activities I found, but she wanted to read more.  So I gave her a Curious George book on CD and she sat with that for the whole book.  She wanted to read more, no interest in activities.  I found the Magic School Bus in the Heart book and so we read that, then she would do some hands on things.  I had her listen to Jon's heartbeat, which she found very cool.  And then we found her pulse on her wrist.  She felt that for a minute.  Then I had her do 10 jumping jacks (next time I'll choose a higher number to challenge her counting I think).  We felt her pulse again and talked about how it was quicker because her heart was beating faster.  Then James woke up.  All in all, a pretty successful first day.  Tomorrow we'll choose a different subject area or go on to hands.  We've officially started the school year, because she's ready to learn.  Awesome that it's still going to be laid back, but she'll be prepared for kindergarten in HP.  If we can get academics to be pretty much covered, it'll make it so she can focus on adjusting to a new place and the social aspects of school.  We're ready!