A Fun Preschool Day

We decided to take Ryan out of preschool in January. I was glad that he had something to look forward to, he loved the painting and projects and especially friends that he got to see regularly. BUT - I missed him. And I realized that this was possibly my last year with him before kindergarten and I wanted to take advantage of it. I wanted to take the opportunity to teach my OWN child. I feel like it is not only my duty, but it is something that I genuinely like to do. It felt silly to pay someone else to teach him when I am always talking to Derek about the time when I will one day open up my own preschool and teach other people's children. Hello! What about my own child?

SO... now we spend time each day doing different projects and activities. Ryan is learning to read and we practice his handwriting. He is very cooperative and likes to help me think of things to do in school. Thursdays are our field trip days where we take rides on the train, go to the zoo or science center, find a neat nature reserve and go on a hike, that sort of thing.

This was a particularly fun day for me because I could see my children learning. And it was completely child-lead so we were doing what THEY wanted to do.

They started off stringing letter beads.

Which then progressed into sorting colors.

Then Ryan wanted to know which color had the most letter beads so we decided to graph it.
Here they are putting one letter in each square (of this huge awesome pad of paper from Uncle Adrian.)

Here are the letters all lined up. We looked at it and could tell that yellow had the most, but Ryan wanted to know exactly how many of each color.

So then we used a marker to trace along the edges and made a bar graph. He counted each square in the blue bar and came up with 23. I showed him the line next to it and said, "If that one has 23, how many do you think this one has?" "23," he answered. I went along that way for each of the other lines and it was fun to see him subtracting one or two from each line to get the answer without needing to count every square each time.

Like I said, it was a rewarding day. Afterward, I couldn't help but feel like a pretty good mom. And I knew that teaching him at home was really worth it because I could watch him learn. I didn't know that he could count to 46. I also didn't realize that he could compare one quantity to the other like that. I probably would have just missed it completely if I had kept him in preschool.