Preschool week 8

This will be the last weekly preschool post for the time being.  I think having two months of preschool progress and activities documented is enough for me to have figured out the sort of things we want to be doing, the sort of things we are doing, and where to go from here.  Perhaps I will go to monthly preschool posts, though with baby brother due in 2 months, that may not start until we're all sleeping regularly.

 


What I have gathered from these past 8 weeks is that unschooling preschool is the best approach for our family.  I wouldn't have known this without these documentation posts, though.  I see that I don't need to teach anything at this point, at least nothing academic, because the whole world is Natalia's oyster still.  Basically, my job in this realm for right now is exposure.  So I am surrounding her with text, both isolated letters and books, both children's and adult.  I am pointing out numbers of items and trying not to count, as I've learned that subitizing (recognizing groups of numbers without the need to count them) is the best way to lay a proper math foundation.

I'm including her in household chores whenever she is eager to help, usually with food prep and laundry.  Yesterday, I hung up a bunch of her clothes on the line and left her with a pile of clothes pins, and she pinned them all in by herself, without much prodding on my part. She hasn't wanted to feed the dog lately, but I think that's because she was getting tired of me double checking the amount and it frequently beeing too much or too little food.  But it's now a joint effort again, so that's good. These are all either math and/or fine motor skills in real world application.

I do see that I need to be focusing on habits, like independent play and certain manners, like knocking and waiting before opening a closed door, consistently putting her dishes away when they are prepped on the edge of the dishwasher, feeding herself again (works best when we preload the utencil or if it's something she is very excited about eating), putting her clothes where they belong - in the hamper if dirty, under her blanket if PJs, back in her drawer if she was laying out several when choosing that day's outfit (yes, she has done this!).  The biggest challenge of course is making sure that she is well prepared to transition into her role as big sister.  Judging by the fact that she includes her baby brother in daily life by talking to him, kissing the belly, playing peak-a-boo by covering my belly button or her face, and telling her toy friends about him, tells me that we are well on our way to success.  Of course, the real challenge will come once baby brother arrives, but it's good that I'm now aware that nothing academic will be even remotely as important as a proper adjustment to being the oldest instead of the only child.

So without further ado, here are a few photos of week 8.

We went to get a 3d/4d sono done, and Natalia greeted the sono tech and said goodbye, with a little prompting.  She didn't love having me on the bed, so I did end up picking her up and cuddling her on the bed.  I'm not sure how much she got that the image on the big screen was of her brother.  We tried to explain it.  It made us excited about his upcoming arrival!

 
She got a bouquet of carnations from a friend of daddy's at his birthday party.  We did flower arranging right away, and then she had shown him where we put it. Then we got a package from my grandmother from Poland with early birthday presents, including lacy doilies, so we found a great place for one of them under her bouquet. I'm going to call this art appreciation!  Or at least beauty appreciation!


And here she is showing how old she's turning at her upcoming birthday, with the presents that arrived from Poland. I'm going to call this math sense, not only because of the three fingers in the air, but also because she has been looking at her small calendar that she has on the fridge and finding her birthday on it, daddy's birthday, and telling her baby brother when he's allowed to be born, because she does not want to share her birthday with him!  I was not expecting her to take an interest in calendars this early, but she has. Yes, I should have taken a photo of her with her calendar, but I think she's starting to shy away from the constant photo shoots, and I don't want to stifle her in the moment by making a big deal out of everything.

Finally here she is getting familiar with her new abacus.  I pulled it out when she watched parts of a homeschooling webinar with me that dealt with building a strong math foundation.  I told her we were looking at an abacus and she was like, "I don't have an abacus", so I said I'd try to find one, and her eyes lit up!  So after the webinar, I got it out for her.  I'm going to modify it so that it fits the criteria that I learned about in the webinar, namely that the beads ought to be easily groupable by fives.  Then, we can work on subitizing.  For now, she has been counting on it (not quite accurately, but at this point, who cares), as well as naming the various colors.  Of course, she has been teaching one of her stuffed toys what to do with the abacus as well.

I noticed yesterday that when we first moved to this house five months ago, we set up her playroom for a toddler, but now, after several revisions, I'm seeing that it needs to become more of a preschooler space, whatever that means.  At the same time, it'll need to serve a dual function for her brother's stuff, so we'll need to keep many of the toddler aspects of it, but at the same time introduce a more developmentally appropriate preschooler arrangement for her. Perhaps whenever we figure out what that should look like, that will warrant an update post.