Pre-K Week 2: Does it Count?
Day 1
Week two started with a weak effort on my part. We did half of Lesson 2 from The Good and the Beautiful Preschool Course Book. I was quite impressed that Clancy recognized the letter A and could tell me which was upper and lowercase! He has never been very interested in letters; we’ve definitely done letter work in the past, and he’s remained oblivious to which is which.
This curriculum teaches the sounds of the letters, but my teacher friend recommends not teaching sounds until letter formation is solid. How I incorporate the sounds so this curriculum that I bought works for us is to focus on words and say them slowly while stressing the sound of the A at the beginning of the word. I am not asking him to tell me what sound the letters make.
This lesson touched back on numbers 1-5. We told a story about ants on our apple, and he used his street sweeper car to count them and sweep them off our imaginary apple! He liked it enough to do it twice, but in this context, he didn’t count 1-5; he looked to me to count each ant. Years ago, he learned to count 1-10. He did it for a few days, and ever since, he has done it differently. This is like how, with the letter formation, he absolutely refuses to make a letter the same way twice, let alone right. I know he will eventually do it right, but it does stump me on how to work with him. He is willing and excited, so I think he is ready to do this curriculum. Just rebellious? Haha.
He identified that Apple and Ant start with an A, but Bird doesn’t. Then he colored them both yellow wildly. He reined it in for the ant at my gentle request that he color just the ant.
There is an alphabet song they have to play, with a video of a truck driving through the countryside. Clancy was transfixed and watched it twice. The singing is rather angelic and creepy.
He did work on Letter Aa formation. I didn’t have to correct him on pencil grip, and he did make the Aa’s, but he did every single one differently; the lower ones looked like ‘o’ and ‘Q.’
The lesson continued, but Livi was tired of chasing the trapped cat around the house, and she needed a nap, so I had him search and find on his own while I walked her down for a nap. I came back and was thoroughly impressed at how many he found by himself, especially since he was a puddle and knew he would get some TV time by now.
Clancy had a very enriched day; he was very helpful in processing and preserving green peppers, creative in building farm implements from his breo pieces, and went out on an inspection of our cattle herd. That morning, he also played in the greenhouse for a long time. His days are filled with a lot of variety here. As all the Hipcampers say, “How lucky are your kids to grow up here!?”
Day 2
The rest of the lesson was pencil grip and introducing the letter Bb, but we didn’t find the time to get to it. We also missed out on the science I had in my outline.
I delegated and had Nathaniel do the math lesson I had planned for Clancy. I turned them loose to string colored beads onto pipe cleaners. He had to match colors and count how many beads. Then he had to line them up from 1-5. They required some guidance; I interjected from the kitchen as they went, mainly for Nathaniel not to do it for him, haha.
I really hope that I can pull it together for week three. I find it really difficult to make time for this. Having a set schedule, I thought would be the ticket, turns out that on a ranch with entrepreneurial parents, it is nearly impossible to have a set schedule. Something is always coming up! I know we have to make time, but dang, it is hard actually to do!
I know he gets to be a part of so many incredibly enriching activities on the ranch, so I try not to overdue incorporating ‘preschool’, but I do know this is important in its own way too. Balance. Hard to find it, even harder to maintain.
