Mother Goose Monday: A Day in the Life

I have had a couple friends ask me WHY I am bothering to do “preschool” with Little Miss since I have two bigger boys who *need* school each day.

And the answer is pretty easy. She likes it. 🙂 Little Miss puts up with a lot, being the little one in the house. You’re right, the boys do *need* school, and I am sad to admit that earlier this year, I spent almost all my time on them, and poor Little Miss didn’t get much attention from me. What she did get, was a lot of TV time.

*cringe*

These days, I have a daily packet of goodies for her, that are easy for me to pull out and roll with. Little Miss asks to “do Em School!” each day, and she gets my time and attention. I don’t feel like it’s extra work, because she’s so much happier with something to do that is all hers, and it keeps her from getting bored (read: destructive… have you ever had a bored little one tear apart a whole roll of toilet paper? I have!)

Here’s how we do it:

In the morning,  I get Bug and Mr. Man started on something (typically, Bug does Math on the computer, and Mr. Man works on his handwriting) and I pull out the Circle Time music, which Little Miss is trained to come running for (I didn’t train her like Pavlov’s Dog- it just happened!).

She comes over, and we have circle time. Sometimes, the boys join us, but these days, I do calendar time separate with them, and Em and I do Mother Goose Time on the couch. We do the opening rhyme (this one was a 5 dragonflies finger play) and we talked about dragon flies.

After this, I pulled out the first activity, the blue color wand, and let her run off to pretend to be a dragonfly while I worked on another lesson with the boys.

Then, she got bored of being a dragonfly, and came over to the table to ask for more “Em School!” and I set her up with the next activity, a small craft and a little notebook, which she ran off with again to draw the bugs she saw on the window screen.

Then, I sent the boys for a break, and pulled out the See and Stack it cards- we looked at the stories on the cards, and talked about the story, counted the blocks, and made towers.

Over lunch, we practiced the new baby sign we learned, “I’m Sorry” and the boys and Little Miss used it the rest of the day.

The final activity was learning about the letter P- we found things around the house that said “p”, and pretended to be dragonflies.

And, that was that. Nothing terribly complicated. Not terribly time consuming, but I was left with a very happy little girl, and the satisfaction of giving her special time with Mama.

Preschool isn’t the right choice for everyone, but I am personally so glad I have been working with Little Miss- it’s the highlight of my day!