Valentine's Day

Who would have thunk that this would be the month I decided to start homeschooling my preschool age daughter. Well, if you know how my pregnancies usually function, then you could have probably guess that I would be getting my energy and sense of purpose back about this time....almost 20 weeks.

So today was kick off day. Well, our official kick off.

Lately we've been talking a lot about letters, and she loves to try and make words with the letters she knows. Talk about motivated. I haven't even been motivated to try and teach her yet, but she is very motivated to learn. She just keeps asking questions that demand answers, and most of them center around making words.

So today we worked on a few new letters and reviewed a few older ones. When I say working on letters, we pretty much talk about the sound of the letter, then find things in our home that start with that letter. Then we read a book or two and point out all the words that start with that letter. Very basic.

But after we worked on letters a bit, I decided it was craft time. She has also been begging to cut out paper hearts and make valentine cards for her friends. I've postponed and postponed to avoid the mess, but today we did it, minus our smallest members participation. Overall I think the mess was minimized because of the seclusion of my two year old. She loves to grab from the table and run off and stick things who knows where. They are not found again until I randomly come across them. Very exciting developmental stage, really.

So back to cutting out hearts. We made hearts and decorated them with stickers, foam letters and hand drawn goodness.

The reason I felt it was worth writing all this is because of the reality that you can't finish a letter lesson with a four year old without expecting the pupil to want to use some of her new words on the valentine cards. What words do we know?

Our name, big, pig, bug, best, and pad.

Out of those words, which do you think are her favorites......
Big and pig.

That is what she wanted to spell out on her cards to her friends. How do you explain social etiquette to a four year old. It has caused all kinds of smiles on my part. What a great first day to homeschooling....officially that is!

Thankfully, to finish the story, I talked her into spelling 'love' and 'hi' to her friends. Then she got to write her name as many times as she could fit on each spare spot on the hearts. How personal, how special.

Did I mention I let her cut out a few....she did great!

Serious fun-ness!