Starting School

Several weeks ago, I shared a few plans for our pre-K that we would be embarking on at the beginning of July. Plans have been derailed just a bit over the last few weeks ... vacation took us a little further into July and we need several days of re-entry from that; that was followed by "day camp" with the cousins for six days. Our schedule and planning sort-of went out the window so, with a little reshuffling, we are starting up this Monday!

Our theme this coming week is going to be the United States. I was able to find some nice sized wall maps at Target (in their $1 section) and bought both a US map and World map to hang in our learning area. Some of the activities we will be doing this week are:

• locating our country on the world map, locating our state on the USA map (and where our Ohio grandparents live), and locating Washington D.C. on the map


• talking about symbols of the United States (the flag, the White House, the Liberty Bell, the eagle, etc.) Using information from Ben's Guide to the U.S. Government website for this.


• a bald eagle lunch bag craft (I want to start having a craft time on Thursdays this year ... more on this later).


• listen to the National Anthem and the Pledge of Allegiance. N1 hears the pledge every week at Awana and I want to work with her on officially committing it to memory this fall.

We'll also be working on our letter of the week ("w" in our Explode the Code books) and some dot-to-dot pages that have larger numbers in them (not just dot-to-dot to 10, but 30 or 40+). Lastly, we made a HUGE trip to the library on Thursday and so lots of reading is in our future, along with several books about the US. If any of those are winners, I'll post later on which ones we really enjoyed!

Anyway, this is our humble beginnings. My plan for the following week, Lord willing, is to spend a week on the Olympics and China. I always look forward to the opening ceremonies and the games and I couldn't pass up this opportunity to tie in to this big event. We'll be using material put together by Candace at His Mercy is New ... I probably won't do as much as she has laid out since her girls are a little bit older, but I thoroughly appreciate the head start that she is giving me here! :)

Hope you all have a great weekend! We are expecting Travis home from a fishing trip any minute and are ready to hang out and play with him this evening. :)