Progress Family: Preschool at our house!

First of all I want to say thank you to Becky for somehow finding ABC Jesus Loves Me and then telling me about it. Second, thank you to the makers of ABC Jesus Loves Me who have developed the perfect program for our home and made it free for use in private homes. (For those who are interested in more detail, we are using the "4 year curriculum" at present, just doing the parts that fit into our lives or out of our library and supply box.)

The curriculum is very extensive, but I've decided to just pick and choose what is best for us right now. I don't want Jonathan to be one of those kids who knows how to read, write, do math, but not how to behave or be kind. I'm not going to focus on teaching the "intellect", but focus on training the will/spirit and do the fun activities that support normal development. It would be scary to me if Jonathan were able to read all of the material that is out there in the world if he didn't yet have the spiritual foundation to help him process it all and discern what is right in the eyes of the Lord. So the 4 year curriculum focuses on a single character quality each week, such as Faith, Obedience, Attentive, and has a corresponding Bible Study and activities to go with it.

Here the boys are working at their new desks. I mostly focus on teaching Jonathan, although Joshua likes to join many of the activities too. In this picture, our focus of the week was "Giving." They are coloring a picture of the widow who gave her last two coins to the temple.

One of the corresponding activities was to make rubbings of coins and start learning about money. We used local coins. One of these days I'll have to teach them about American currency! We also made "offering banks." They get a coin for helping me do the dishes in the morning, and then we empty the banks on Sunday mornings and take them to church. The boys love putting their OWN money in the offering.

I've made a rotating gallery on the wall here, at the boys' eye level, for all of their artwork.

We do a handful of worksheets every week, which gives the boys some practice at deskwork. Most of the activities are more active though. We've done a nature hike around the neighborhood where we collect samples and make a big poster. Every week there is a suggested game for developing fine motor skills (like moving small objects with tweezers or painting with q-tips) and large motor skills (kicking balls, jumping and hitting balls.) Below is one of our favorite large motor skill games called "put out the fire." I made a chalk ladder and fire on the sidewalk. The boys had sponges (washcloths for us) and got them wet at a bucket at the bottom of the ladder. They had to walk "up" the ladder and then squeeze out their water on the fire until the chalk was all gone.

Jonathan puts out the chalk fire at the top of the ladder.

This was a fun game for Joshua to participate in too. Here he is dripping water from his washcloth onto the "fire"

Here the boys are playing with kidney beans. This activity didn't work so well for the intended purpose, but they still had fun. The theme of the week was "Patience" and the story of the week was about Abraham being patient to have a baby, Isaac. In this activity, we counted out beans to show the ages of people in our family (Joshua, 1; Jonathan, 3; Mommy 38) and compare them to Abraham's age (100). I just don't think their brains were ready to understand the comparison concept ...but they had fun playing with the beans!

This activity was so fun! We were learning about "Obedience" and the story of the week was Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in the fiery furnace. We made these "Fire Crayons" by melting old fire-color crayons in a muffin tin.