For a long while now, I've been wanting to start doing a preschool type deal with Jack. He is at such an impressionable age and he's so smart and picks up things so quickly. I've been kicking myself that I haven't taken advantage of his curiosity sooner.
I wanted to start preschool with him, not only to teach him things, but to also provide a little more structure to our day. Less tv time is better, but it's sometimes hard to know how to entertain this bundle of energy all day long.
I decided to take a cue from Jack, and thought that I would teach him about things that he is interested in, so that he would have positive associations with "school time". Together we picked dinosaurs as our first unit.
We did lots of fun things including making a dino coloring book, making a fossil out of plaster of paris, gluing "dino bones" (dried noodles) to a dino skeleton, breaking open dinosaur eggs, digging for dinosaurs in the sand, playing with stick puppets, tracing the letter "D" with pudding, sorting dinosaurs, learning dinosaur names, reading dinosaur books from the library, practicing dinosaur matching and prewriting practice, dinosaur cutting practice and sewing practice, learning dinosaur related vocabulary, and watching tons and tons of dinosaur shows on netflix.
Basically, we lived and breathed dinosaurs for those two weeks. It was a lot of fun. Jack really surprised me with his ability to complete complicated assignments, and I was SHOCKED that Jack actually would prefer to watch a documentary about dinosaurs over watching a dinosaur cartoon. He calls them his "real, big dinos".
I've had so much fun doing this with Jack. We had to put things on hold for a little while because of graduation and the move, but now that we are all settled in I'm revving up to get started on our next unit--- transportation. We already took a field trip to the Hill Air Force Base to look at the planes. Posts on that to come...
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