homeschool recap: A is for Apple

Last week I started a formal preschool curriculum with Des. While he has been pretty resistant in the past, he seemed ready to learn! Balancing Desmond's lessons with Zoey's was a bit of a learning curve, but we basically devote mornings to the preschool curriculum, letting Zoey tag along, with me sometimes making things more challenging for her, but mostly letting her just have fun helping Des learn. After lunch I devote time to her curriculum while Des has quiet time or plays outside.

We are doing a letter a week for preschool following The Peaceful Preschool and the supplements from Simply Learning and Silvan Reverie. Last week was all about the letter A and apples. Focusing on apples really gave Des a concrete object to connect to the A letter and sound. He really made that connection and I am so proud of him.

We are studying A for an additional week, and I plan on devoting 2 weeks per letter, unless he shows that he doesn't need it as long for others.

a. Set up for counting and identifying which type of apple we have, using Farm Anatomy as the text. Also a scripture card for us to recite and Zoey to copy into her notebook.
b. Stamping letter A's onto a capital A.
c. Studying the anatomy of an apple. Zoey notebooking by drawing the parts and labeling them.
d. An art lesson in stippling.
e. Practical skill practice - washing apples in preparation for eating.
f. After reading The Apple Pie Tree and How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World, we made a homemade pie from scratch.
g. Studying constellations. We used Nature Anatomy and played a fun constellation game on PBS Kids before drawing our favorites and putting them into Zoey's notebook.
h. The finished pie. The kids were so proud. They did all of the peeling, cutting and measuring and mixing.
i. Letter formations with play dough.