Our Preschool is in Session!

Awhile ago Brian and I decided not to send the boys to preschool. I have the time and I love to teach them things. I also have the opportunity to watch little Alexandra for extra money and to give the boys a built-in playmate and pretend little sister. We’ve had her a few days a week since she was four months old and we are all in love with her. I think the three of them get enough socialization with each other and all the other friends we have. Sometimes it’s so much socialization it makes me want to plug my ears and curl up under my bed in the fetal position, but it’s usually healthy socialization.

This fall many of the boys’ friends are off at preschool, which takes away the option of morning playdates with those friends. Meanwhile, I’ve been looking at a whole bunch of preschool units and activities to use for the boys (and Alex!). Pinterest is brilliant. As I’ve been doing this I’ve also been organizing a bunch of our pictures. I found pictures of the past year and noticed all the ways that we work learning into our days, even without all the museums we visit and not counting our road trip learning adventures.  

So far the boys love this. 

We have community center classes starting this week, but I’ve also been doing more preschool-y things with them.  They’re so obsessed with Sid the Science Kid that they’re throwing around words like elasticity, inertia, estimation, and investigation. The other day Clark leaned over toward the toilet and said his poop looked like animal communication. Weirdo. Those 30 minute Sid episodes actually introduce some great ideas for activities to do on the topic. I often pick out library books that go along with something we’ve been hearing about—something that interests us. I feel like this is such a natural way for kids to learn. It is authentic learning. Buzzword.

I’ve been giving the boys reading lessons from the book, Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. My aunt and mom recommended the book and it’s been great. The lessons are around 10-15 minutes long. I first started doing it with both of them at once, but now I’ve figured out that they do better when I go one-on-one with them. The book recommends starting kids at age five, so I wasn’t sure how they would do since they’re only three. I figured I’d try it out and see. I think it would be too much to do one lesson every day but they do well with having one every couple days and we do repetition of the sounds pretty much every chance we get. They’re interested in knowing what words say—on signs and shirts and packaging. It’s an amazing feeling to see the lights go on when something connects for them and sounds become a word. So. Awesome.

Anyway, I’m pulling out my homeschool preschool for the fall and am excited. I thought I’d share some of the pictures from the spring and some from recently that show what we’ve been up to. Much of this is prompted by what the boys are curious about. Maybe I’ll be a teacher some day. J Wait...

I'm keeping binders with the writing parts of their
reading lessons so we can watch it progress.

They practice their sounds and they're already sounding out words like pros!

Juice-making party

Tracing letters combined with sidewalk art



Physics! (sometimes painful)

Picnic after fountain-running

You would know all your planets if you slept under them too.



"Pushups"

Painting their rocket ship birdhouse

Exploring the ponds by our house: Science.
Exploring the ponds by our house while sprinting: P.E.

GIGANTIC flower!

Butterfly-watching at the ponds (Cal said the butterflies
were saying, "Calvin, you need a dog.")

After reading The Busy Tree, I drew a tree and they drew spiders and
squirrels and owls and ants on it...and then...

...we watched water absorption in our celery with food coloring.

Blue celery spots!

Picking things up with tongs: hand-eye coordination

 

Running in swim shorts in the sunny rain, looking for rainbows

Tracing letters- they love this

Exploring water

Getting set for some experiments

Dumping salt on an ice block...

and squirting watercolors into the salt trails...an ice sculpture!

Color-mixing

Tracing bodies after reading about body systems

Give Cal anything and he'll paint it.

Going on metro adventures...learning to read maps and navigate

...using Smart cards

Playing baseball with Dad after his games

Music?

Activity I tried for a class I took

More color mixing

Painting guitar picture frames

Paper space shuttles

Real astronaut gloves and boots!

Shopping on a $10/each budget

You seriously can't tell what I just drew? Baseball field. Duh, Mom.

Why am I Writing About This Woman?

Sometimes a certain librarian at a certain library makes me want to slap her in the face. Is that bad? Maybe. I want to go on record as saying that aside from this librarian and my storytime encounters, I absolutely love our library and its proximity to us. I even like the quirkiness of some of its patrons that comes as a result of the library being next to a homeless shelter. 

The first time I had a run-in with this woman was when the boys were 13 months old. How do I remember that age? Oh, that’s because storytime at the library requires babies to be 13 months old before they can come to the infant-2 years storytime. They also have ONLINE REGISTRATION for storytime? What the f$&%? I know. So fascist. I touched on the story and how my library visits have changed here, but here’s the storytime incident: I pushed them in their double umbrella stroller to the room where storytime was held. At the door I was told I could not take the stroller in. Okay. I wonder how I will contain my crawlers? I asked if she could make an exception since I had two. No. Okay, well, I’ll try. All the parents were perfectly arranged in a half circle, sitting cross-legged with their one child on their laps, with the exception of a dad whose son was standing over in the corner, not in anyone’s way, just walking around quietly. Note: there was plenty of room for my stroller to be over in the corner by the boy walking around.

Putting both boys on my lap lasted about all of 30 seconds before one started sprint-crawling across the room. Yes, I got a glare from said librarian. I bet you didn’t know fascists wear duck puppets; I’m here to tell you that they do. Soon the fascist spoke to the father in the corner with his kid. “It would be best if everyone was sitting over here.” Seriously. After some more glares and awkward, disciplinary pauses from her, I decided to take the boys out and put them in the stroller. So I did. Then I put the stroller in the doorway so we weren’t in the room but the boys could see the story. By the way, they were interested in listening and watching once they were contained. “It would be best if there were no strollers,” the fascists passively-aggressively told me in front of everyone. I blurted something along the lines of, “Are you kidding me?” and I took the stroller and left. I had every intention of writing a letter to the library over this behavior, but I never got around to it. A good thing that came from it was that I met my friend Susan at the playground a few weeks after the incident. The icebreaker: “Aren’t you the one who was kicked out of storytime? That was ridiculous.” We’ve been friends ever since.

Over a year later I decided to give it another shot. We went with some friends. For some reason Calvin freaked out when we got to the library and didn’t want to go to storytime. Perhaps he remembered the fascist dictator that ruled last time. But, stories hadn’t started yet so I tried to calm him down by the door. He let me take him in and was beginning to settle down. Let me reiterate, stories had not started and the librarian was not even trying to start reading when she looked at me and said gruffly, “He can’t stay in here like that.” I left with both boys.

We went to the kids’ room in the library and read books ourselves. Interestingly, one by one, other moms came out of storytime and into the children’s section after, I can only assume, being passively-aggressively kicked out. Needless to say, we have not tried another library storytime and have no plans to. However, we do go to the library often to get books and read books and to look at the mural on the wall with the lion that got his foot hurt and the mouse that is helping take the thorn out. The boys are obsessed with that part of the mural, and the Hansel and Gretel candy house.

The other day my friend the fascist was the librarian in the children’s section and I asked her where the educational Dr. Seuss books are located. “Hmm. What do you mean?” Really? I explained to her that the series is from the Cat in the Hat PBS cartoon and they’re on different subjects like space and desserts. Blank look. “I don’t know. Maybe they would be over here in content sorted books…or beginning reading?” I’d like to add that any mom I’ve mentioned these books to knows about this series, and some own them. She then found the series on the computer, with much mumbling, and put them on hold for me. Next I asked her about books about cars or transportation in general that she might recommend for kids my kids’ age. “Hmm, none come to mind…” What. Isn’t every boy (besides mine) obsessed with cars and trucks? And don’t children’s book authors know that and write about them? Don’t librarians know a lot about books? I was trying to get my boys psyched up to see the transportation exhibit at the American History Museum. Fortunately, another librarian was beginning her shift at that time and had some great suggestions for me. How delightfully and refreshingly librarian of her.

I’m a little annoyed at myself for dedicating even this much of my time to writing about that librarian, and I want to love our local children’s librarian, as a concept. Anyone know a good children’s librarian looking to relocate? 

Our librarian would probably not approve of sleeping with books. Too bad.

The Spunky Suds soap giveaway ends in a few hours! Put your name in the hat.

Our Poetic Pretenders

I’ve always heard that children are natural poets because of their unbridled imagination—because they have not been taught to second-guess themselves or conform to convention—what poetry “should” sound like or look like. The point is that time, and thus experience, silences intuition and creativity. I believe that to be true. However, since 7^th graders are the youngest age group I’ve officially taught, I don’t think I’ve gotten to truly see that on a larger scale. While teaching poetry in 7^th grade I still had to work hard to undo what kids thought poetry was or was not in order to pull from their unwilling pens some rewarding and creative, original poetry. Teaching poetry to seniors in high school, most of whom had sordid pasts with poetry, was even more challenging. What I found that worked for all ages is teaching poetry through music.  Not that I enjoy every genre of music, specifically what 9^th grade boys pump through their headphones, but kids love to listen to their favorite songs as homework and typically they can find figurative language and rhyme scheme in them and even appreciate an extended metaphor. They don’t even know it, but they like poetry. 

All that introduction to tell you that the boys have been delighting us with their creativity and imaginative play lately. Their imagination is not bound by convention, and in that way it reminds me of writing poetry. I can’t wait to read what the boys will write! First thing is first though, I realize. I purchased a book about teaching reading that came in the mail yesterday, and I can’t wait to start. My hope is that they will continue to have such active, think-outside-the-box imaginations that they demonstrate from all the pretending they do.

Here are some of the highlights of their creative pretending lately:

Office: They love to pretend they are going to their office. We took out an old keyboard and propped up a hardback book in a little box so they have a workstation with a computer. They love to say they are working on something and click the keys. The first night we played office I put on their neck ties and they really enjoyed playing their parts.

work station

What is the code for that? Dang it! My HTML is rusty.

Okay, the tech guy is here to help.

Library: They take a canvas bag and declare they are going to the library, walk down the hall, and come back with books. They have a newfound interest in older books we haven’t read in awhile due to this pretending. The variation on this is that one will pretend to put his shoes on, open the front door, tell the other one to “watch Mommy and Daddy” because he is “going to the library to find a new Signing Time video and sit on the blue and green chairs.” This variation can get cold with all the door opening and closing, so there is a limit on the amount of times this can be played back-to-back.

Food: This one is elaborate and extensive. We have a nice collection of play food—mostly old Fisher Price food from when I was little that I love too much to let go of—and the boys always have it around. They started putting plastic eggs and vegetables and fruit up on the real stove, which always scares me a little since I don’t always see them put it up there. I found a clump of plastic green beans on a burner last night right before I turned it on. They recently started feeding play food to stuffed animals—this started after Halloween when Cal started pretending to feed candy sauce (I don’t know what that is) to his “baby ceiling fan” (his costume) and I encouraged him to feed something that actually had a mouth, albeit a fake mouth. We put bibs on the teddy bears and the fun still hasn’t ended. At lunch yesterday they were feeding their real macaroni and cheese to their animals, which really meant they were dumping it on the floor.

feeding ice cream and chocolate milk to baby teddy bears in bibs

We don’t have room for a chunky toy kitchen in our house, but the other day I took a box from Costco that had a panel that flipped open, somewhat like an oven door, and the boys helped me turn it into an oven. We painted it, glued on old CDs as burners, buttons as knobs, and a bead as a handle. I’m pretty proud of it. Cal lately enjoys baking corn on the cob in the oven and Clark likes to cook eggs and bacon directly on the burners. Perhaps they will revolutionize the culinary arts. They also love to pretend things outside are food. The favorites are white pebbles by the pond are popcorn, mulch is cookies (or else keys to open doors, which is weird), pine needles are hay for horses, etc.

Clark monitors Cal's progress painting the oven-box.

painted box, CDs for burners

fashioning the back of the stove

Cal cooks whole fruits and a cupcake...yum?

Mmmm.

Everything is a Bat: Pretty self-explanatory. Anything that could possibly be used to hit something smaller is a bat. This includes but is certainly not limited to: toothbrushes, paper towel tubes, utensils, shoes, blocks, tubes of Desitin, etc. Swing it like a ball player, drop it, and run the bases, and it is a bat. (See also, Everything Else is a Ball)

Here, the football-dart thing is a bat...

...and here the acorn is the ball.

House: Outside there are two “houses.” One is between two large bushes and could conceal two boys excellently until a recent trimming. In that house they like to sit down and watch baseball, Signing Time, and of course, eat dinner. The other house is under a pine tree. That is the house they like to clean, which means they pick up the pine needles, run over and throw them into the parking lot, and demand that I kick them. This pointless task burns a lot of energy so I haven’t mentioned to them that it’s pointless.

Clark watches baseball while Cal cleans the house of pine needles.

Hair: Yesterday the boys raced out, sat down on the living room floor, Clark on his bottom, Cal on his knees, and Cal began slowly running something across Clark’s head. “I’m cuttin’ Clarky’s hair,” he said seriously. He was using a toy zebra. “It makes a loud noise,” he told me. Since we cut their hair using clippers, this made sense. Well, except the zebra part.

zebra shears

I can’t get enough of all the pretending they do. I wish we could copy this imagination that little kids have, bottle it, and force-feed it to the lifeless lumps of pimples and cologne with earphones that sit in the back of the classroom and refuse to lift a pencil when it is time to write. I suppose if we could though, it would be totally normal to see adults making mud-pies and playing house and so little kids wouldn’t be as charming. Also, we would have a lot of mud-pies.