Lilly completed her first 2 weeks of school. I'm so glad she enjoys school and she's the one asking to do school each day. Most mornings, when we haven't even gone downstairs to eat breakfast, she'll ask if we can do school. She motivates me to be consistent with doing school during the week. Lilly calls me "teacher" during our school time. That's all her! I didn't tell her to call me teacher! I don't mind. I suppose it makes it our school time more official.
The schedule now is to have school Monday-Thursday. I've been trying to do it in the morning but this week was also Mia's first week of dropping her morning nap. Mia in the room during school time does not work very well. She grabs at everything and tends to get fussy between 9-11am if she's not engaged in doing something. So school time will probably change to after lunch, when Mia naps, and before Lilly naps. That's probably only a 30 minute window there. 30 minutes is enough time for our Bible time and preschool activities.
I'm planning our school curriculum around the alphabet. We go through 1-2 letters per week and I base the lesson and activities around the letter of the day. Last week we did letters A and B, and we learned about ants, airplanes, bananas, and the Bible. We learned ants have 6 legs and observed them with a magnifying glass on the sidewalk. We also flew paper airplanes off the front porch. This week was dedicated to the letter C. We learned the hard c sound like cake, clouds, and castle and the ch- sound like Cheng, Chinese, cheese, and chicken. We counted from 1-10 in Chinese (I hope to keep this up so she'll be learning a little bit of Chinese). We also ate string cheese as a snack and did the Chicken Dance. My goal was to get to the soft c sound like circus, circle, and Cinderella but we didn't get to that this week.
Here's a video of Lilly sharing about what we did at school that day:
And another video showing how proud I am of Lilly writing letters: I was completely surprised by Lilly writing those letters. She told me she wanted to write Evangeline's name "Nange" on her "Favorite Things" collage because Nange likes piggies, princesses, and the color pink. I was expecting her to write some scribbled lines, like she usually does when she pretends to write, but I was totally blown away. I hadn't worked with her very much on writing letters. A while ago, sometime in the winter, I tried pushing her to write the letter A, but she couldn't do it. I thought she just wasn't ready then and didn't want to push anymore. I didn't practice writing any letters with her other than her name L-I-L-L-Y. Now here she is, simply writing letters as I say them! She's writing the letters from right to left instead of left to right, but I'm still very impressed! Yes, I'm a proud mama.
And lastly, a video of Lilly reciting the Bible verses she's memorized (with some help):
Sweet Lilly is all grown up. She's become school-aged! Well preschool-aged at least.
