teach me mommy :: apples

This year I opted out of preschool.  Actually, I opted Ava Carmel out of preschool.  

And myself out of the time commitment of making sure she was there three days a week.  

Plus, it's no secret that I'm pretty sad that all my little children are growing up and starting school.  So since I'm the mom and get to decide everything (to borrow a phrase from a disgruntled Cam regarding piano lessons)... Ava and I will be doing our own school together this year.

It is simple and easy.  I do it once a week for an hour or two.  I have made a fall schedule with the topics for each week, so there will be no brain cramp the night before wondering about what we should do.  And I have made it officially official by entering it onto the master fall schedule.

Oh yes.  I totally have one of these.  I love to sit down with my nicely sharpened pencils and enter everything in.  It gives me quite a thrill.  For reals.

So anyway, once a week Ava and I will be meeting to discuss the ins and outs of her abc's and all other preschool craftiness and snack time delicacies.

Last week we began with a little class about apples and the letter Aa.

the APPLE agenda:

1. FLASHCARDS
showed her the cycle of a seed (from some little hand drawn flashcards), let her color the pictures in and then put them in the correct order a few times.

2.  PAPER SACK
gave her a brown paper bag to draw an apple on and her name

3.  NATURE WALK
went for a little walk around our yard to look at all the growing things (pulled out a couple of things, so she could see the roots.)  We ended our walk at our apple tree, where she picked a couple of apples to put in her bag.

4.  APPLE DISCUSSION
we talked about the color, the shape and guessed how many seeds there would be inside, and then we cut it open to see if she was right

5. Aa IS FOR APPLE
played a little online A game on starfall, practiced writing a's (worksheets can be found here), played a visual recognition game on our little chalkboard (I write a bunch of different letters all over the board and she circles all the A's and a's.  Then we count them up.)

6. PAPER PLATE APPLE CRAFT
I forgot to take a picture of the finished product, but we began by gluing her seeds from the apple onto the inside of one of the plates.  Then we painted the outer side of each plate red.  I drew a little stem and leaf that she cut out and glued to the top.  We taped the plates together, so she could open the apple up and look at the seeds.

7. APPLE SNACK
sliced apples with peanut butter spread of them and chocolate chips stuck onto the peanut butter.

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