Monday/Tuesday... Reese

Rachel here. Preschool the last two days has gone GREAT! A Monday - Thursday schedule is definitely best for Reese... hopefully no one will get sick for the rest of the "school year", and we'll be good to go. ;) These activities aren't in the order we did them in, they are just in the order they happened to fall in while organizing before and after photos. (Just in case you were dieing to know.) Last week I bought Reese a computer game from Target in hopes to re-spark her interest in working on the computer. It's a PBS program and has a lot of characters that Reese knows, so she was super excited about it. She was willing to give it another go and played it until she got frustrated. She was able to answer a lot of what they were asking her, but she's still working on mouse control and having a hard time with it.
This is a cute little number matching game I made while student teaching Kindergarten. I still had it! You have to match the head with a certain number of stickers on it to the tail with the identical number of stickers. Reese did really well when I told her to slow down and count each sticker one at a time. She has a hard time slowing down.

I set out some of her wooden puzzles. I was telling Bryan the other day that if we have any more children, they can't have double identical letters in their names. Reese can spell her name but does so like this "R-E-E-E-E-E-S-E." Poor E-M-M-M-M-M-A will have the same problem I presume.

I found this old school Memory game at the thrift store a while back. While we didn't play according the rules, Reese did REALLY well with matching each card from the left bowl with a card in the right bowl.

I laid one set out for her in the box and lid, so that she could see them better.

Color sorting with buttons.

Monday and Tuesday's letter was /b/. Reese did awesome. She made a bumblebee, a butterfly, and she decorated her /b/ with band aids.

Reese put globs of paint on one piece of paper, put another sheet on top, and smoothed it out in order to make her butterfly wings.

We even had time for a play date. A and L came over to play... we'll be picking those dates back up every Friday this Fall. While A and Reese tend to be two ships passing in the night, L and Emma Grace play well, and the adult conversation with M is always nice. :)

I attempted to have Reese work on the new and improved alphabet. She did MUCH better this time, and I didn't want to pull my hair out. I made sure all the letters were the same color as they were on the sheet, and there are guidelines for where she was supposed to put the letters. She did still ask "what's next Mommy?" after every single letter, but I'll take what I can get.

Reese loved pouring Cheerios into each of the different containers.

This is one of those puzzles where you have to match all four sides with the neighboring pieces. Obviously Reese wasn't going to be able to do that, but she did really great with it and had a blast.

She was even able to do all the nuts and bolts on her own this time. VERY EXCITING!

I read "Brown Bear Brown Bear" to Reese, while she found the pieces of her wooden puzzle and put them together. It was really cute.

When we got to the last page that lists all the colored animals, she had to put them back into the box in that order. She then took the puzzle to the table and did it about 3 more times.

I wasn't sure if Reese would be able to do this activity as I've noticed she's forgetting her /a/ and /f/ sounds. Each picture on the left matches with a word on the right. Obviously she can't read the words yet, but I picked out all the sounds we've covered so far. She did so amazing with this. I would say "Can you find your /b/ for the baby?", and she'd find it right away and put them together.

We had snack, and the girls decided it would be so funny to dust all the Cheerios around on the table and knock them on the floor.

I made Reese clean them up. Her technique was pretty entertaining, and I of course had to finish cleaning up. :)

More with practicing the letter sounds. I took the sandpaper letters and used them as the letter headers for this sort. I have about 8 cards for each sound but only did 4 for each. Once she figured out that each letter sound could have more than one card underneath it, we were money. I would say "Reese, can you find the /f/ for the fan?" She'd put it right under the /f/ well over half the time, so that was encouraging.

Reese also worked on her color matching with her animal hospital. Each door color matches a key color... Emma Grace plays with this toy more, but Reese was into this afternoon.

Hopefully the rest of the week goes as smoothly as yesterday and today went. :)