I was hoping to be able to post more regularly with my themes, but recently finding time to write up a post has been rather difficult. So I thought instead I would do a single post for the entire month of September. I will likely do the same for October as well. Maybe soon, I will find myself with the time and energy to split them up into more bite sized pieces.
I try to do a new theme each week with my preschooler. the first week of September we did a back to school theme which I covered in an earlier post, here. The remaining weeks we covered four other themes, Apples, All about me, Fall and Space. They were each a lot of fun. Some were more involved than others, mostly depending on the time available. But that is one of the benefits of homeschooling for this, it is much easier to work around our schedule.
Apples
This one we had a lot of fun with and actually did quite a few activities. We made an apple lacing card with a paper plate, a couple of popsicle sticks and some yarn. My son really liked playing with this and turned the little worms into good friends!
The final two projects were some simple strips of paper used for cutting practice on which I drew some apples and guidelines to follow while practicing and an apple tree with some red buttons that we glued on to make the apples. My son very much enjoyed the apple tree craft, and it turned out very well.
Besides working on fine motor skills we also worked on counting the number of apples to decide which sheets we would cut, and counting the buttons we glued to the tree. We worked on our colours, particularly Red and Green, and of course the letter A was a natural letter to work on this week.
I am not approaching the letters of the alphabet in any particular order, so I just pick whichever letter works for the theme of the week. We do sing the alphabet song, but right now I am more interested in introducing the idea of letters than in trying to learn the alphabet by rote. I have noticed that a very handy tool for this is actually the show Super Why, which seems to teach letters and reading very well. My toddler has been picking up a lot of letters from watching this in the mornings.
All About Me
I don't have any photos for this one as we didn't do many crafts for this. This week we focused on learning our full names, and learning about our body parts.
I drew some ovals with necks on some scrap paper and we drew in our faces, and talked about what colour our hair and eyes and lips were. We sang "head and shoulders, knees and toes" a lot, and also played Simon Says , with a focus on our faces and bodies. "Simon says touch your nose, Simon says touch your knees", that type of thing. We talked about what our bodies can do, jumping and climbing, and that we need sleep and food to help our bodies do these things. We also started heading towards potty training. We have tried this before and did not have much success so we are beginning that journey again now.
Because this week was mostly games, it was actually a fairly easy theme to organize, but it was quite successful, and I was really pleased with how well he did.
Fall
This was a fun theme for me, as I really enjoy seasonal and holiday themes.
One of the activities we did for this theme, was a sensory bin. I used a bag of fabric leaves I found at the dollar store, and some small, plastic, autumn themed beads that were purchased at a yard sale. with a few plastic cups and some kitchen tongs we worked on sorting. After a few minutes my son picked up on the sorting very well and he came back to this activity repeatedly. This same sensory bin has actually been used for several themes since then, including our woodland and halloween themes in October, just switching our the objects to find and sort.
I also set up a threading activity, using some pipe cleaners to make a tree shape and threading cheerios over the branches. This was another favourite activity, as the cheerios were alternately added to the tree and eaten by fistfuls!
We also did some baking this week, making a plum pudding. Baking is such a wonderful activity for homeschool, with opportunities to work on motor skills and to work on math skills and reading of recipe cards. For an additional life skill, and sensory activity you can have them help you clean up afterwards as well. Water play is often a favourite with littles.
The pudding was delicious, I had never made one before, but it turned out great!
One of the other activities that we do often, but made a point to do this week in particular was to take a fall walk. My son spent most of the last couple of months afterwards pointing out the yellow and red trees everytime we drove past them. He is a big fan of crunchy leaves and really enjoyed the trek.
We made a point to walk past the pond and point out the geese and the other fall wildlife, and talked about the coming of winter and why the trees were losing their leaves. Walks in the fall are one of my favourite activities as well, so I very much enjoyed it.
Space
This was one of the themes I was most excited about, my son has been an absolute nut for anything space related recently, so I knew he would enjoy this!
One of the activities we did for this theme used an air dry clay that the supermarket we go to has been giving out for free as part of a promotion to make our own rocket ship. My son has really enjoyed playing with it. We also built a model solar system we found at the dollar store together. This one required quite a bit of help from mom and dad, but he has very much enjoyed playing with the end result.
We sang a lot of "twinkle twinkle", and also "stretch and grow, reach for the stars" this week. We played with all of his space toys and read one of his favourite books, "astrophysics for babies" over and over again! We pretended to visit the moon, and watched a couple of magic school bus episodes. He had a great time with this one, and we will likely repeat it sooner rather than later.
So that was our September in my little at home preschool experiment. So far it seems to be pretty successful, and I am looking forward to what the rest of the time will have in store!