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Showing posts from July, 2012

Making a Good Case (Kindergarten Readiness Test #2)

The most common thing you hear about summer as it relates to kiddies it that they forget a huge portion (usually said to be half, but that can’t be true, can it?) of what they learn all year over the summer. So every so often we do something to spark what we learned all year. We do lots of little things, integrated into our fun time like:    ü   When we’re in the pool we talk about whether our toys or ourselves are more or less dense than  the water.    ü   When we’re on a roadtrip we talk about how far we are from where we are going (whether I plan to or not) and what state we are in and which states touch it, or start with the same letter, or are bigger or smaller than the one we are in.    ü   When we have snacks we try to count how many we have or do the math problems of we started with x and we ate y so how many should we have left?    ü   We always read. Stuff like that. As my planning turns from ...

A Day at the Beach

So this isn't exactly instruction on a specific topic, like I usually do in my blogs. This week is mostly a creativity exercise with math and reading add-ons and summer survival tips. Anyway, without further adieu... I have been watching my girls at their gymnastics classes this summer.   Every week has a new theme – the Olympics week, horse riding week, etc.   What is interesting is that the activities they do don’t really change. On Olympics day they were vaulting for the Gold medal and got Olympics rings stamps and coloring pages. On horse riding day they were vaulting onto a horse, etc. Regardless, each week my girls were excited anew about their unique experience that day. The reason that I was reflecting on what made these same activities seem new is a situation that I think many parents (if not every parent) of preschoolers can relate to.   We have a Toys R Us’s worth of toys in our house, but “nothing to do”.   Usually my girls are in school for h...