I started homeschooling Owen for preschool this fall and we've really been enjoying it. He is obsessed with his "school books" and is constantly taking them down off the shelf and looking through them. We are using the Sonlight program 4/5 curriculum. He's younger than they recommend, but I felt that he was advanced enough for it and really since it's basically a lot of reading and any additional activities are up to me, I'm glad I made that choice.
On this particular day, we read through our required books based on the lesson plans that come with the curriculum. We read a few nursery rhymes, a poem or two, his favorite book - the science and nature book, and Things People Do (pictured). Each week, he learns about a different job. This week, it was a baker. So in honor of that, we baked raspberry oatmeal muffins.
I have been trying to do more arts and crafts projects with Owen lately. I really need to help him more with his manual dexterity and doing some coloring helps. He's also always proud of his art project and gets really excited to share it off to Tim when he gets home from work. On this day, we did a craft I found on Pinterest. We collected leaves from the yard and did some leaf rubbings.
The second part of the project was to make "caterpillars" using the boys' toes (Graham got in on the action too). Owen thinks its hilarious when I use his body parts to paint different things. After they dried, we added google-y eyes, legs, and antennae and glued them to the leaves. They are the cutest.
The caterpillars turned out really cute and we made sure to make enough to send to the grandparents.
Next we practiced counting. I tore off the lid to an egg carton, numbered each spot, and then we practiced putting the correct number of beads in each spot. It's a super easy to put together activity and Owen really had fun doing it.
He basically has 1-6 down, but he gets impatient with the higher numbers and tries to add several at a time. He'll get it.
Lastly, we made some muffins to go along with our lesson about bakers. This recipe is from Skinny Taste. You can find the original recipe HERE. It calls for blueberries, but we had raspberries on hand so I used those instead. They were really yummy, but Owen has issues with blueberries and raspberries so he picked them out. Sigh. Either way, he still loves to help me in the kitchen and it was a great day of homeschooling. We don't always do this many things in one day, but I try to have one or two art projects a week and a few other activities. And lots of playdates and playing outside when it's nice out.
