shred it: First Day of Preschool

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I know this isn't quite traditional, but the boys had their first day of preschool today :) I've written a few posts about it already but in short, we have decided to keep the boys home this year. We have no idea what we will do next year or any year after that, but for this year we will be doing some preschool activities at home- trying to introduce some structured time for the boys and to keep their love for learning burning bright!

This morning we worked on a few things. We started with the boys' names. They each had a card with their name on it on their desk. We talked about the letters and sounded them out. We traced them with our fingers and then with our crayons. Then the boys practiced writing their names on the thank you cards I have to write out for their birthday. Matthew wasn't super interested in writing without the guiding lines, but Caleb managed to do 3 cards where his name was actually readable! Then I got out a bunch of foam letter stickers and dumped them in a pile on their desks. The boys had to search through the pile to find each of the letters in their name and place them over the written letters on their cards. When they had each spelled their name again, they got to peel off the stickers and place them on their pencil boxes! The whole activity took about 25 minutes- and they sat still for the whole thing! That was by far our biggest accomplishment of the morning!

After that we did some cutting practice. Right now the boys are just practicing holding the scissors the right way, so I just let them cut up a few sheets of blank paper. They are really getting the hang of how to position their hand and cut AWAY from their bodies. Maybe tomorrow we'll try cutting on some lines for the first time.

Lastly, we came out to the living room floor for a numbers activity. I picked out all of the 1 through 6 cards from a deck of cards and scattered them on the floor. Then I gave them some dice. They had to roll the dice then find the corresponding number on a card. After a few turns they didn't even need to count the numbers on the dice- they were quickly able to identify the numbers from memory. To clean up, I had them sort all of the red cards into one pile and the black ones into another. On my way to put them in the box, I "accidentally" dropped them all and we had to pick them up one more time. This time we sorted them by numbers. On my way to put them back a second time Caleb said, "Don't drop 'em again mama!" LOL.

All in all we ended up spending about 40 minutes on learning activities this morning. About an hour if you include the three stories we read and discussed before nap :) And I'll be damned, I just might be on to something... I think all this fun learning must have worn them out because low and behold- today is my first successful nap since moving into big boy beds!!!! Woohoo for preschool!!!!

My big boys are all ready for their first day of "preschool"!