Pre-K ~ Seasons, Airplanes and more

We have had a lot of fun starting up with our Pre-K year these past two weeks. This year, we will mainly learn through unit studies that will integrate different skills. Much of our hands-on approach will be inspired by the changing seasons, making use of Waldorf, Charlotte Mason, and Montessori ideas. We will also throw in some more traditional workbook learning, although I want to still limit this at this young age and prefer for our learning to occur in a more interest-based, organic way...

Nature Study:

Nature Study is a very important part of our homeschool. We spend a large part of our day out in nature, which might be on nature walks, in the park, at the beach, or simply in our garden. Our experiences are very child-led and give us an opportunity to enjoy nature, notice seasonal changes, and learn about plants, animals, etc. On one of our nature walks this week, the kids came up with a sink/float experiment with leaves, stones and twigs... 

It's been incredibly hot here, so we enjoyed a couple of afternoons at the beach looking for sand crabs and shells...

Art

Learning Toys: 

Smiley loves building toys at the moment. Here he constructed an airplane...

Handwriting

We worked on the letters F and L these past two weeks using Handwriting without Tears.

Math

We worked on a math game from Confessions of a Homeschooler and completed quite a few pages in Singapore Earlybird Math A (this is really easy for Smiley, but I am using it to review concepts before we officially start Kindergarten next year). 

 Practical Life:

Smiley and Lovebug helped me make yogurt, crackers, bread, muffins, and chicken stock these past two weeks. Both love to help in the kitchen!

 Reading:

We worked on the -at family...

 Seasons:

We learned about the 4 seasons by reading The Berenstain Bears' Big Book of Science and Nature  and did this craft to go along with it.

We also did an experiment using an orange (as the earth) and a flashlight (as the sun) to learn about how the earth rotates around the sun over the course of a year. (Sorry, no pictures). 

 Airplanes:

We talked a lot about airplanes this week. The kids built an airport and airplanes out of Lego

and we did a field trip to an airplane museum...

 Tar Pits...

We've been reading through the Magic Tree House chapter books and finished reading the book on Sabertooths and the Ice Age, as well as the research guide that goes along with it. To round out our experience we took a field trip to the Tar Pits...

one of the highlights was a robot sabertooth that came to life during a cool presentation...

And finally, meet the newest member of our family, Monkey, almost 4 months old. A main reason for my neglect to update this blog in the past several months! 

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