Sunday, March 21, 2010

pre-school activities

Emily's communications are getting more and more sophisticated. It is not uncommon for her to use 3 word phrases and she has been known to mimic 4 word sentences. The two word sentence is the most common ie: Sissy sad. Dolly sleeping. More bread. Mommy back (which means come back). Daddy work. Emily happy. Mommy dress. Big shoes. She and Claire have been playing together more and more lately. Claire likes to quiz her and tells her, "Say doctor, say spider, say monkey..." Emily is only too happy to repeat the requested words. Lately Claire has been heard to say to Emily, "Emily do you want to do couch time with sissy?" "Do you want to go swimming with sissy?"

Pre-school activities have mostly consisted of learning Spanish rhymes and numbers while jumping on the ball as well as counting by twos in English and working on counting 14-20 one of which always gets skipped. We also do an alphabet song in which she supplies a word beginning with each letter of the alphabet and we do rhyming. In addition we do dexterity work like sewing kits, puzzles, drawing with markers and chalk, or other craft projects. We also do a couple baking sessions--- She has recently become much more competent at stirring dough and she likes to name each of the ingredients when I ask her what I should get out in order to make muffins or scones. We sometimes do a card game or board game too. She is getting much better at taking turns, but sometimes dilly dallies when it is her turn We check out library books and read from our own collection including Bible stories and her Ladybug and High Five magazines. We also have a digital clock made from card stock which we talk about and she likes to manipulate the dials and aks waht time it is. We try to go to play group two days a week but she still doesn't play with the other kids very much. I think part of it is that she doesn't have the mental picture for some of the things they pretend since she doesn't watch TV. Friday they were pretending to be pegasus and unicorns or sometimes it's some specific Disney princess etc. At other times she is more interested in checking out their toys than playing with the kids. (Maybe we should start reading fairy tales.) The one thing we try to do 5 days a week is have a 45 minute quiet time while Emily is napping.
This makes it sound like we do a lot but we cover this in a two week time period.

2 comments:

JB said...

It does sound like a lot of work and it also sounds like Claire is developing needed preschool skills, thanks to you, Mom. How exciting that Emily is old enough for Claire to engage with her more. It sounds like more fun and games are in the offing.
Keep up the good work, Jen.

Nanna said...

I love reading the details of your daily activities. But it does make me miss you all a lot. The girls are blessed to have each other and you two for parents. All your activities are fun and meaningful. I like your insight on the influences that are involved in children's pretend world. I just read a comment by the author Jan Karon on her early childhood influences that set her apart. These were when she was about age five. She fell in love with classical music and her grandmother gave her a book of poems by Robert Frost. No one else she knew loved these things. Love, Nanna