My oldest daughter started online Kindergarten this week. It helped that we had set a foundation during our homeschool preschool lessons, although it wasn’t always an easy time to get her to follow through with lessons I had planned. Her having a real teacher this year rather than just me I think will help get her to follow through with her lessons because she can’t use the excuse this isn’t even real school, as she often did over the years during our homeschool preschool lessons and play time. This week I’ve been able to explain to her this is what your teacher expects you to do, and the extra stuff we do is all suggested and expected by your teacher in order for you to be promoted to First Grade.
Below are some of the simple things we did throughout the week to reinforce learning in fun ways.
In addition to the lesson plans provided by my daughter’s teacher I made coloring pages for the week for both my daughters to do together. I kept in line with our personal theme of the month apple trees and used that to reinforce key concepts from her school lessons.
In art my oldest daughter learned about the key elements of art therefore I decided to create an additional art activity to reinforce the concept further. We made apple trees with construction paper together, the night before I made the sample in order to explain and point out the key elements and how they’re used within the apple tree construction paper picture. We used construction paper and glue for extra fine motor and scissor practice.
Materials we used to make the apple tree art.
–Blue construction paper to glue everything onto. (Blue sky background.)
–Green construction paper for the grass and the tree top. for the grass I drew a curved wavy line in sharpie for my daughter to follow and cut out. I drew a curvy line with a straight line at the bottom for my daughter to cut out the tree top.
–Brown construction paper cut into a rectangle for the trees trunk. I drew an outline of a rectangle in sharpie onto a brown piece of paper.
–Orange and white construction paper. For the sun I drew a circle on white paper, that I glued onto orange paper. On orange paper I drew angled lines around the white circle and then cut it out following the angled lines resulting in the sun.
–Red construction paper for the apples or red dots which ever is preferred.
–Sharpie
–Glue
I made five different coloring pages the idea is to do a different coloring page each day, some days we end up doing two and none the next depending on my kids moods. I use the coloring pages to provide more simple reading into my daughters day outside of her reading lesson time. Coloring pages are a great way to include my youngest daughter although she often just grabs her sisters coloring pictures and makes a mess. At her age it’s just about exposing her to crayons and prewriting skills.
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