Infectious

The one thing kids don't mind sharing... germs! Aislinn was sick last Monday, then Liam came down with the same thing on Thursday and now I have it. At least I think I do, my symptoms are different than theirs. They each had a fever and fatigue, I don't have the fever, but the fatigue is kicking my butt and it feels like I have rocks in my head. Aislinn and I both had a nap today.

But let's look on the bright side, or at least a different side. We took out our Halloween decorations out today, and even feeling as awful and I do, watching the kids go through the bins was so much fun. Aislinn is so excited, you can't help but feel her energy. The best part was when the kids started trying on some of their old costumes, Aislinn makes a damn cute Pigglet!

Hopefully I feel better tomorrow so I can clean up the mess they made...

Week 3

Another great week! Aislinn was actually begging me, "please, can we do preschool!" So it looks like she is enjoying herself as much as I am. Here is our focus for this week...

Our letter for the week was B, our animal was Butterfly and our word of the week was Bug. We talked about bugs having six legs and the fact that a butterfly is a bug. We looked at the life cycle of the butterfly and read a great butterfly book. We crafted a handprint, construction paper bee, a coffee filter and clothespin butterfly and "colored" a butterfly by gluing on dried beans.

We also planned on making a pine cone bird feeder with peanut butter and bird seed, but got as far as finding the pine cone in the woods before I realized that our bird seed is in a bin, on the deck, under the roofer's tarps, so I guess that project will have to wait. She was too cute, when we were in the woods, she kept saying that we were looking for a "pineapple!"

Here's our paper bee and coffee filter butterfly

And our dried bean butterfly

The number of the week was two. We colored a big number two and colored a picture of two flowers with two butterflies fluttering over them. We'll focus a bit more on our numbers in the after the first 10 weeks pass. We'll be starting back at number one and adding new challenges.

The shape of the week was the square. Shapes are another thing we'll focus more on later. For now we just did a workbook page, traced some squares and colored them.

The color of the week was blue. We gave her blue crayons and marker quite a workout this week! We also talked about the other colors that start with the letter B, like black and brown.

We ended our week with our B collage and the B page of Aislinn's alphabet book.

A bit distracted

As we wrapped up or third week of preschool Aislinn seemed a little distracted today. I wonder why. You think it could be because this...

...was going on over our heads? The roof is finally getting done, yippie! There is a dumpster at the end of my driveway and a swarm of carpenters banging away. Ripping off the old and putting on the new. I'm most excited about the new skylights. I'm looking forward to the next rain storm, it'll be the first time in years that we won't have to shove towels around the edges of the skylights to keep them from leaking. There's excitement in the air, Aislinn likes watching out the windows and Diego (the dog) is hiding under the bed. The poor thing is NOT thrilled with all the banging and the strange men on top of his house. If all goes well I'll have some after pictures on Monday, and a much happier dog.

Custom Crayon Colors

Our attempt at making our own aqua crayon wasn't really a success, but it wasn't a failure either. First, I must tell you this... don't attempt to melt crayons in the microwave. It doesn't work out too well. The paper cup started to burn and the crayons were still solid. So Aislinn and I scrapped that attempt and tried again.

Our second attempt worked out much better! I use a double boiler approach with a empty tin can.

The crayons melted in no time and we mixed our two colors together in hopes of creating an aqua colored crayon....

We wrapped the melted crayon in wax paper and waited for it to cool.

And then gave it a try!

Did it work? Kind of. I think we needed to add more blue to the mix. It turned our more of a forest green than an aqua color. But that's fine. Aislinn had a blast with this and learned about mixing colors. I will do this again for sure, when our color of the week is a secondary color, and she can have her own little collection of custom crayons.

Two Owies

Aislinn had her 4 year check-up! My poor little sweetie needed 2 shots. :( Well, she needed 4 before kindergarten starts and my doc and I don't like the idea of doing so many different vacs at one time so we did two now and we'll do the other two next year. Ais was not happy AT ALL about being there and the two shots were icing on the cake. It took her over an hour to recover from the trauma and get back to her old self. Then she spiked a fever overnight. She slept right through but I was up half the night checking to make sure the temp didn't get too high. By morning she was fine.

The good news is she's a healthy little bean! She's still teeny-tiny, but growing well along her own growth curve. She's actually made it up into the charts with her weight! At 4 years old she's 30 lbs, which puts her just above the 5th percentile. She's gone through a major growth spurt, we just took out her warm clothes. She shot up sometime over the summer, because everything that fit last spring is now several inches too short on her. She'd down to one long sleeve shirt, two sweaters, 6 pairs of pants and 3 or 4 dresses. Time for a shopping spree!

Week 2

Aislinn is catching on quickly! I was afraid she would resent the fact that Liam gets to go to school and she has to stay home, but she's really having fun and I can tell that she enjoys the one-on-one time with her mommy. When I tell her it's time for school she hops right into her chair and seems ready for anything. I sure hope this excitement about school lasts!

Our topics this week:

We've started an alphabet book. I printed out a tracer page for each letter and stapled them together with a card stock cover. She decorated it with stickers and did the first page, "A." We will do one page per week. We've also done a few other worksheets to reinforce the letter A and the number 1.

She did an apple tree coloring page and we made a construction paper apple tree. If the weather holds we will go apple picking before the end of the week and bake an apple pie. Today we studied ants. She did an ant coloring page, we read about ants and then went out in the yard in search of ant hills. (we have plenty of those!) I forgot to make the thumb print ants I had planned, so we'll probably do that on Friday. We'll also explore our color of the week, aqua. We are going to melt some crayons (blue and green) to make our color of the week. When it cools she can color her circles coloring page with her new aqua crayon.

I thought it would be fun to show you around our "classroom." Also known as the dining room, craft room, computer room and occasional laundry folding room....

Above the piano we will display our weekly letter collages.

Here's one half of our alphabet boarder and below, the artwork, painted by Aislinn.

The other half of the alphabet and Liam's artwork. The kids painted these about a year ago.

And this is our schedule board. The day flows so much better with the schedule, and if I don't stay organized I tend to forget things. Although, I've been a tad bit out of whack the past few days, sometimes I just can't face "clean-up time!"

It'll be fun to look back at these pictures when we reach the end of the year.

So far, so good!

The school psychologist called me today. I heard her voice and went into panic mode, but quickly calmed down when we talked. She said that Liam had a fantastic start to the year! Not one single concern, no outbursts, no meltdowns, nothing. Woohoo! She said it could be a honeymoon period, since they haven't really started the meat and potatoes of things, but it's a good sign of things to come. Right now he meets with the psychologist once a week (I think, I'd have to read the I.E.P. to be sure, it could be twice) and she said she'd give it a month and if he's still doing so well we can amend the I.E.P. and start to stretch out the time between sessions. This is great news. It is our goal, afterall, to wean off of his various I.E.P. accomidations and have him functioning as a "normal" kid by high school. Every little bit of good news is a blessing after the struggle we went through trying find a proper diagnosis and give him the right tools to function well in school.

Aislinn's doing so far so good too! Today we "tested" her knowledge of shapes and colors. I didn't have any flashcards on hand so I made some. While I was working on that Aislinn was doing her own thing. She made a "Superman Game." She cut paper into strips and when we played she had us each take a strip and put it onto our paper, we took turns and the on who took the last strip of paper in the pile was the winner! I thought she was rather clever and big brother will be proud.

She did great with her colors! She missed orange, yellow and gray during the first game and only missed purple in the second game. She seems to interchange orange + yellow and pink + purple.

Aislinn helped me make these flash cards, can you tell? tee-hee Looks like she needs a little more work with shapes. She got square, circle, oval, star and heart when we played our first game, but missed oval in the second game. So it looks like she has square and circle down pat, but need a little help with the others. I talked about the shape *pentagon* and she repeated it, "penkadon." Too cute!

After our games we did a few workbook pages and then made a collage all about her favorite things. Big brother donated some magazines for us to look through and clip from. As I was cleaning up Ais decieded to play with the markers....

Silly Girl!

Gymnastics

Aislinn and I went to a local gym to see what she thought about gymnastics. I think it's right up her ally, she's not so sure. Part of the problem was our timing. Open gym at this facility for her age group was from 2pm to 3pm and, as I feared, she fell asleep in the car on the way there and woke up clingy and crabby. After about 15 minutes she warmed up to the idea and had fun on the trampoline and the balance beam. At dinner tonight we asked her if she'd like to go again and she said, "ummm, maybe sometime later..." Not the excitement I was expecting.

So, before spending 50 bucks a month on classes I think we'll check out a few more gyms and see if there's a place she finds more exciting. Maybe we can even find a place with open gym in the moring instead of the afternoon and just do that for now, instead of classes. She's only 4, we have plenty of time.

Second and First

Liam enjoyed his second day of school today. I tried to get a better picture this morning, but as I feared, with the sun at his back the pic ended up with an odd glow. At least you can see his cute smile....

Liam's first day of dance class was great! We've been trying to find a physical activity for him since he was in kindergarten but none of them worked out. Basketball, baseball, soccer... they were all too much for him both physically and emotionally but we may have finally found one with dance!

The class is small, which is good and Liam jumped right in. He's not very flexible, but he did really well following the rhythm of the music and even understood a few moves that the other kids didn't quite get. Although, he did get a little tangled up at times too...

Another First Day

Another good first day, Aislinn was having a blast doing preschool this morning! She was having so much fun that when I suggested taking a break for snack time she said, "no, I wanna keep doing this." I was shocked, she never misses a chance to have a snack!

This is what we're focusing on this week

I decided that instead of jumping right in we'd spend this first week playing some games to help me figure out where she stands. We played four games today. The first was a straight-up flash card game. I showed her a card and she tried to identify the letter. She got three letters today, A, S and O. The next game was a find it flash card game. I put out eight letter cards and asked her to find one of the letters, then I'd replace that letter with a new one from the deck. She was able to point out A, B, I, J, L, O, Q, S, U and Z.

We then did these same two games with numbers. She was able to identify 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 when we did the flash card game, and 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 10 when we played the find it game. On Friday we will do something similar with shapes and colors.

My Goofy Little Preschooler

Here she is hard at work on her book. It's all about her and she was very excited to start it. She did all of the coloring today and we will put the book together tomorrow and read it together.

First Day of School

It's that time of year! :::happy dance::: Time to pack up my oldest and send him off to 4th grade. Ahhh the peace and quiet my youngest had today with Mommy all to herself!

The kiddos are 9 and 4 years old, Liam and Aislinn. Today was Liam's first day back at school, he said he had a good day and seemed in good spirits so my guess is that his transition went well. And of course, like every first day of school he's had so far, he came home with homework... for me! It took me an hour to fill out all those forms, but I am proud to have finished my "homework" early. tee-hee

Tomorrow is a big day for both of my little critters. Liam starts dance class (modern dance) and Aislinn will be starting homeschool preschool. I started up this blog to keep track of our educational endevors. Both with Aislinn's preschool and with Liam's 4th grade year (his first year with an IEP for his sensory processing disorder/anxiety disorder.)

Here's a pic of Liam, headed to school! The conversation between the two of us when this picture was taken sounded something like this, "Liam, let me take your picture." "The sun is in my eyes!" "Say cheese!" "Mom, switch places, the sun is right behind you." "It's the first day of school, and we're late, let me get a quick picture" "Ugh, the sun!" "Oh, just say cheese and get in the van..."