Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Kindergarten - Week One

Little Man is now in his second week of kindergarten. He was so excited to start kindergarten, but I'm not sure he knew why he should be excited since he has been in our homeschool since he was born! He has heard others talking about it though, and I did try to make it a big deal since this is his "official" start in school (and my last baby to go through kindergarten with ~ boo hoo!).

His kindergarten experience will be different in some ways from our first child's kindergarten experience, since he has so many older siblings to try and keep up with. My personal philosophy is "better late than early" so I am committed to not pushing him to do too early what will come easily later. Still, he wants so badly to do everything his siblings do!

This week he:

made his history notebook (with his brand spankin' new scented markers!),



made a cookie dough map of Egypt,


acted like a little Egyptian boy and went shirtless!


and made papyrus and painted hieroglyphs on it.


For something fun while I worked on other things with his older siblings, I found this book where there is a puzzle on every page.



Inside each page's puzzle there was one big "shaped" piece that was fun to find!


In addition to all the history stuff he did this week, we started a couple kindergarten things just for him. He and I will be using a beginning book from the Handwriting Without Tears series. This curriculum uses wooden shapes to help the student build and trace the shapes of all the letters. Before we began using them for their intended purpose, we had a day where we just played with them and built whatever we wanted to build!




AND....(drumroll please).....the thing that Little Man was most looking forward to about kindergarten.....

his very own Math U See book!!



This was a new activity I bought him to help with number recognition. All the number puzzles link together, but they only link up with the correct puzzles on each side, so it is self correcting.



He happily linked and laced for about an hour.


And that was Little Man's first week of kindergarten!

7 comments:

CAB said...

Awesome first week - looks like he's doing great! My next to youngest is 4 and some of these activities look perfect for something to help him in learning and give him something to do when I need to work w/the olders or w/the littlest :)

Rebekah said...

How exciting! He looks like he's having so much fun :)

Beth in Texas said...

How fun! His drawing of the pyramids is incredible.

lahbluebonnet said...

He linked and laced for an hour? W-o-w! My son never did that. He always had to be in the middle of what his big sister was doing, and beat her to all the answers. In hind sight I would have bumped him up and sloweed her down. It would have made her Physics this year so much easier I think, to do it with him.
Blessings,
Laurie

Pam said...

Laurie, yes an hour! My kids are like that with something brand new. Believe me, it wears off. :-)

JB and Cathy said...

Joy, I have to tell you how much I am enjoying reading your blog. I am also doing TOG Year 1 (though with just LG kids) and it's fun to read your ideas and experiences. You are a good writer and a good mom! Glad to have "met" you.
Today's post made me chuckle as I saw how similar our boys (mine is 4 1/2) are.
Cathy

Angela said...

he looks so proud and excited - that's awesome!