Brainstorming for Fall 2013

Tonight I am attending my first parent orientation night for Raccoon. He will be going to preschool twice a week for three hours a day. But after this year, my husband and I feel like homeschooling is still the best choice for him. With this in mind, I want to begin figuring out what works for him and what helps him learn.

I LOVE this post about following the lead of the child. One of Celosia's rules is: If it's not working, stop. I haven't even started school with Raccoon and I already feel like my natural teaching inclinations are not going to work. I need a better plan. When Raccoon's hunger to learn is not satisfied, we are all miserable.

So, first, a list of what he likes with ideas of how I could make it school-y:

* taking pictures (he evaluates and chooses what he likes and wants to display, vocabulary, composition, lighting)
* physical activity (following directions through an obstacle course, a walk in the woods, scavenger hunt with labels)
* videos (educational clips, Netflix profile)
* being read to (books, magazines)
* likes freestyle crafts (cutting, gluing, glitter, tape, materials)
* imaginary play (write and perform skits, mini-movies)
* writing in the sand
* sensory play
* social / emotional role play
* field trips with learning pages

I also need to come up with new ways to use what we have. And keeping Robin involved but safe is going to be challenging as well.

Summer Days

I have decided that this is our last official summer of Tot School. Raccoon starts preschool twice a week on September 3rd here in the States. Next year we'll be overseas again and starting to homeschool kindergarten, if all goes according to plan. Robin will be starting Tot School at about that time, which is odd to think about now since she's currently 6 months old. At that point she'll be a little shy of two years old. As Gretchen Rubin says, "The days are long but the years are short."

So here's to Tot School and Raccoon's last official post (the pictures are all mixed up time-wise, viva la summer loca!).

Arts & Crafts

My mom gave me these pumpkin sheets when Raccoon 

randomly announced in July that he wanted to make a pumpkin.

He actually wanted to carve one, but was persuaded to do it this way instead.

Thanks to Grama, Raccoon has done many large paintings
this summer, which I have hanging all over the house.

See the tongues sticking out? It's a family thing. Perhaps painting is as well, 

since my mother's father was a painter, among other things. This is the 

beginning of one of my favorites, which I have hanging in my bedroom.

When I see pictures like this, I imagine him as a teen,
long and lean, with his curly hair and gorgeous lashes.


Outside Play

Our wading pool, a yard sale find.

Which became our sandbox, thanks to my mom's inspiration and contributions.

Enjoying play time with his cousins.

 

A lake about 10 minutes from our house. Raccoon calls it the beach.

Mommy and me moments

 

Pensive ladies on shore



Raccoon loves horseback riding, just like his mommy.

 

Raccoon has always enjoyed bouncy houses, but now he gets to play on them
every week at church. This one, however, was outside at the 4th of July festival.



The way life should be.

 
A perfect summer day, jumping on the trampoline in the sprinkler with Daddy and his best buddy, C.

It wouldn't be tot school without a little dress-up.

 River swimming - it's cold!

Building

 

Caleb gathered up a stack of thngs from his playroom 

and informed me that he wanted to make a horse.  

  

I followed his instructions and this is what we built. There 

weren't any spare parts, much to my surprise. It even had 4 legs.

Family

Raccoon's middle name means warrior and he certainly lives up to it with his 

interest in weapons of any kind. His cousin is now his hero for having the 

biggest Nerf gun he's ever seen, and letting him shoot off several rounds.

Grama and Grampa, 4th of July 2013

I think Robin looks so much like my mom.



We are definitely a hat family.

Robin

I like this picture because she glows like the angel she is.

Strawberries to celebrate a long-time friend and SB's turtle,
which has now been chewed on by all three of my babies.

Joy.

 

Teeth!

Robin's first baby doll, a gift from Grandma Millie (90 years old) at church.

Museum of the Month

It's been a long time since I've done one of these posts, but hopefully there will be more in the future. There are tons of interesting places to go near our new home. This month's was the KidsQuest Children's Museum. I got free passes through our local library, hooray!

I chose to go right at noon, thinking that there wouldn't be many children there, but I was wrong. It was very crowded and Raccoon soon felt anxious and overwhelmed. Robin was not happy either (see her bored face), but she fell asleep shortly after we arrived.

What Raccoon did enjoy - as much as he could on sensory overload - were the various water tables. He spent the most time connecting various pipes, along with getting thoroughly wet.

We have been to two other children's museums in Maine, but neither one was as busy as this one (at least while we were there). It makes me a little sad that I thought it would be fun, but it mostly just ended up being stressful for all of us. When things are going well at home, or at least whatever is our normal, sometimes I forget what life is like outside our safe zone. It just reminded me that I am still a special needs mommy.

Weekly Review - Miscellaneous

Raccoon is 36 months

This is a very long post, sorry! I didn't think we did much for Tot School until I started looking through my pictures. We did something a little different this week. I didn't have a particular theme, but Raccoon watched several videos on YouTube and then wanted to do activities based on them.

When he watched Be My Valentine from the Richard Scarry's Busytown series (very late at night I confess) he jumped off the couch and told me he wanted to make a valentine for Hilda the hippo so that she wouldn't be sad. I had to support such noble intentions and we got out his "arting stuff" as he calls it.

 

The moose stood in for Hilda since we don't have a stuffed hippopotamus. Satisfied that his valentine and cutouts made her feel better, Raccoon headed off to bed.

 

 

Another day we watched We're Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen, and went on our own bear hunt in the park, properly armed of course. Raccoon had no intentions of running away from the bear since he wants to be a hunter like his grandfather.

 

 

After watching Curious George's Mulch Ado About Nothing (in Spanish), Raccoon decided he wanted to make some compost too. We put in a banana peel, onion skins, grape stems, and an apple core in his bucket, then Raccoon decided that he wanted to add some water and dirt too. He was disappointed that it didn't smell bad right away like Curious George's compost. I left it outside and he checks on it daily to see if it's decomposed (and stinky!).

 

 

 

We also did a few organized activities, continuing with our spooky theme from last week. You have to check out how one of my favorite sensory blogs turned this pumpkin face page into a magnetic matching activity, brilliant! I used the same idea for the shadow matching activity from this Pre-K Pack. I especially like her recommendation of cutting up advertising magnets, since I can't get plain magnetic strips where I live.

After we did the haunted house, for the first time my son asked if I had more games like this one, so I let my son play with the pumpkin cutouts and matching sheet before I did the magnets. After matching everything correctly, he made up his own game using both sets. Later when he saw that I’d glued the magnets onto the pumpkins, he told me, “We already did that, Mama!” Ah, my son, the king of no-repetition.

Another big event this week (for me, silly mama) is that Raccoon did his first maze. He's done them on his iPad before, but never really seemed to get the concept on paper. I thought he might like the bat and haunted house on this maze so I printed off one. To my complete surprise, he not only got the idea but wanted to do it several times, so I printed off a new one to put in a protector sheet.

Although we're still have printer problems (sigh), I finally did do some of the landform activities I'd planned a few weeks ago. This is him jumping on our couch in excitement, holding his new "map" and a pillow. It's a great landform poster, and the pdf includes the landform mini-books (pictured below) that I used as well. I bought it during one of Scholastic's pdf dollar deals. Sorry, my iPad camera has no idea how to focus on my bundle of energy.

Next he decided that we needed to go on an expedition, and these were the provisions that he wanted to take along - his battle axe, his current best friend "Cheetah," the map, his laptop, and Melissa & Doug's Noah's ark.

Then we made him a boat (a plastic toy box with a rope tied around it for me to pull) for the expedition. Thank goodness we have tile floors. Captain Raccoon would consult his map and tell me where to go. Our couches were plateaus, the floor was the ocean/river, one corner of the room was a cave, etc. And as with all Raccoon activities, the faster he arrived the better!

Later in the week (when I finally finished putting together all of the mini-books), he pretended to be a teacher and "read" or showed each of them to his class of plastic animals.

 

 

But mostly this week we just played with toys we have around the house. One of his recent favorites is this set of magnets. I bought them at a yard sale awhile ago and he likes to "go fishing' with them. He builds himself a pole and I put together some shapes (2D and 3D) for him to "catch." Or we make an aquarium with starfish (below), a zoo with centipedes, or whatever. We usually end by trying to use all of them to make one big cage.

We got out his marble run this week as well, which I finally managed to assemble so that it didn't constantly fall apart. This is fun, but sometimes we both get frustrated with it coming apart before we actually get to use it. It's a great lesson in patience (for both of us!) and in "being gentle." This day we were quite successful though and played with it for maybe a half an hour or so.

His favorite toys are actually his plastic animal/bug collection. We have a large basket full of dinosaurs, zoo animals, marine animals, insects, spiders, etc. and he plays with them again and again. I could write a special post just on all of the uses we've found for his plastic animals (habitats, sorting, classifying, carnivores/herbivores, predators/prey/food chains, classmates, spectators, good/bad guys, etc.). These are some of his newest additions, a birthday present from me to him.

And of course there was lots of pretend play! Here's builder Raccoon making a house.

 

Building Blocks - I made the basic monster and Raccoon decorated it with fences, a giraffe hat, people, plants, etc.

Adding some "thorns" to Mouse's tail.

He doesn't like clipping clothespins to cards, but he loved doing this!

Cooking

 

Cars

 

We didn't do any Raising Rock Star Preschool this week and I hope to resume this next week with the letter Ii.

The End!  :)