This Week: Penguins!

We are having a great season of preschool! Henry is happy to be learning and makes progress every day. We are still working on potty-training and our main focus for school is just improving his reading. He will now verbally spell words out unprompted. It is fun to open the front door and hear his little voice whispering "L-O-C-K. That's lock. Yeah, that lock."

I got him to try tracing some letters by using some printable letter pages, I think from 1+1+1? I put them in a binder in sheet protectors and let him use tiny dry erase markers from the Target dollar section to trace the letters. He loved erasing them with the eraser too. We also just do do-a-dot pages and I'll be opening up a new pack of skinny pipsqueak markers to color with tomorrow.

This week our theme is Penguins, and we've been having fun reading some really great books. Greg has been reading The Narnia Chronicles to him before bed, and I just started reading Mr. Popper's Penguins during the day. We've also found some great picture books, including One Cool Friend, Tacky the Penguin, and Penguin. Of course there is always our old favorite, Osbert. Henry hasn't asked to watch Pingu yet, but I'm sure that will happen too.

Greg does "Math School" with him about once a week but I am hoping to join in and do little games throughout the week. He would love memorizing whatever math facts we taught him but we are hoping for a more conceptual understanding.

I am planning a big geography survey based around our continent boxes, but I'm not sure when we'll start. I guess I originally planned to do Antarctica when we did Penguins, but I don't feel like I've prepared enough yet.

I found a great website for a study of artists and musicians. I had some classical cds I got at a prior homeschool convention and I hope to get some more when we go in May.

It's hard not to feel overwhelmed by all of the awesome plans I'm making right now. It feels like there is so much work to do, especially considering our budget limitations, but I'm trying to remember to focus on the basics for now, and realize that by the time Henry is ready for these substantive topics, I'll have it figured out.