First day of Co-op Preschool!

It's School Time again!!  If you didn't read my last year's posts, we do a parent led co-op preschool in our neighborhood.  We meet once a week to give our at home kids some of the exposures and experiences they would have in a preschool or day care/group care setting.

I used the same schedule as last year.

Arrival
Snack
Circle
Activity 1
Physical Activity
Activity 2

I tried something new with our circle time and did a welcome name song.  We sang "Where is (name)?" to the tune of Frere Jacques.  It was a little long, but I loved how excited each child seemed to be at the mention of their name.  We also practiced keeping a beat with percussion instruments.

Our updated circle time board has a spot for number and letter of the day, but we mostly just reviewed the weather and agenda and I started to lose the group, so off to our first activity!

Activity 1: Name Tracing!

My son is just learning to hold a pen and has tons of interest in tracing.  I made tracing sheets with each child's name.  I recently bought a laminator (I bought the AmazonBasics Thermal Laminator, it's not a new school year with out a new office tool!)  so I laminated each sheet and we used white board markers.  I love having different materials/pens/colors for Colin to practicing writing with and I know he'll need lots of practice writing his name,so it was perfect!  

Activity 2: Alphabet Hunt!

Toddler provided for scale! :) 

To break up our inside activities, I wrote a huge alphabet on my back patio.  Not everyone participated, but those that did ran around finding the letters in their names or other letters they recognized.  It should hold up pretty well on our patio, one of the few benefits of the draught, I suppose, so we can keep playing!

It was funny with my son, when he was looking at the letters upside down (like in the photo) he would turn his head sideways to decide what they were, I think it's a good sign that's hes starting to recognize the letters since he knew they were upside down, right?

Activity 3: First/Final Day Interview

For our last activity, I printed double sided sheets with a 1st day/final day of school interview.

My plan is to keep these safely tucked away with our school supplies and then pull them back out and finish them at the end of the year.

I'm not sure if it was the extra child (we have 9 this year instead of 8), the siblings being older, or just first day excitement, but that was about all we could take!   I cut our closing circle short (much to Colin's frustration ("Why didn't you read the whole book, Mommy?? There are more words in there!")

Looking forward to another year of learning with our friends!