Breaking Ground

It's amazing to me how our perceptions of things change as parents and educators. I've found the more down and dirty I get into parenting the more I realize how little Doodle needs notebooks and fancy worksheets and how much *I* need them.

It's true. I sit down and look at the worksheets I've set aside for tomorrow and realize there is nothing on those sheets I could not teach to him using something physical and tangible for him. However the longtime student in me just cannot let go of the idea of using "proper" worksheets and workbooks.

I'm getting better at organizing our curriculum and lesson plans. But that's just a fancy way of saying that I'm learning what works for us and what doesn't. Workboxes are awesome for me to keep organized of what I want us to be focusing on and learning about, but it doesn't mean we actually get through them all. Or even any. Today was a total bust on the workboxes. But we did spend an hour playing with coffee beans in the sensory tub. I got the idea from http://www.childcareland.com/ who posted a video about doing a sensory tub with pom poms. She mentioned giving kids scoops and containers to fill with the pom poms and let 'em go at it. Since I've been looking for a way to help teach Doodle about Kenya's agricultural products (Coffee and Corn being some of them) I thought this would be an awesome sensory activity for us this week. We bought whole coffee beans and he spent a good 45 minutes scooping, funneling and pouring into different containers. Plus the entire kitchen now smells of coffee. Yummy. Tomorrow I'm going to allow him a coffee drink (high milk & some sugar added) as a way to wrap up the coffee part. We then spent 2 hours at the pool relearning how to play in the water and hold our breath for jumping in. If I remember correctly, he's a fast learner and it wont take long before he's off the diving board again.

Tomorrow we're going to be spending some time at home and working on our boxes. I do want to try and get through a few things each week just to keep up with our summer goal of finishing preschool.

Our boxes tomorrow contain :

-Rainbow Colorbook : Doodle gets to color the 1/2 page drawings with the color indicated and then we turn them into a book. He seems to do about 2 pages a day before losing interest. Review.
- Kenya Word Art : Doodle will take the word "Kenya" and get to decorate it with whatever he wants.
- Math Stickers : One of the math books Doodle likes allows him to use stickers to count. We try to do one or two a week. New

- Sequence Rummy : Doodle LOVES cheap flashcards and he especially loves these right now. I'm working on putting it into our workboxes once a week to keep it fun for him. New.

- Science | Taste : Bake Muffins.
- Music - Itsy Bitsy Spider : I'm really not that great at music stuffs so I hope to be able to follow through on introducing one new song/rhyme to Doodle each week. We're going to be printing & coloring a matching book with lyrics to read as well.