Preschool Week 18 (February 8-13)

Our theme this week was Friends.

• We continued talking about love, including the aspect of Friendliness “Being Kind and polite to other people.”
• We learned Proverbs 17:17 “A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for adversity.”

Our book list included:

• Ira Sleeps Over, by Bernard Waber – Ira is planning to spend the night with his neighbor Reggie, but gets worried when Ira’s sister starts asking him whether he is going to take his teddy bear and won’t Reggie laugh at him that he sleeps with his teddy bear that has a funny name. Ira wavers back and forth about whether to take the bear or not, finally choosing not to. But as they go to bed, he finds out that Reggie also sleeps with his teddy bear, so he goes back home to get his own bear.
• Thy Friend Obadiah, by Brinton Turkle – Obadiah is followed by a seagull and is rather annoyed by it. He wishes it would go away. But when it does disappear for several days, he starts looking for it and wishing it would come back. Finally he sees it on the wharf with a fish hook wrapped around its beak. Obadiah rescues the bird, but the bird then flies away. Obadiah is sad that night, but then discovers that the seagull is back in its usual place outside his window for the night. Obadiah is glad that the bird is his friend and that he is the bird’s friend.
• Twist and Ernest, by Laura T. Barnes -- the first in a series about a miniature donkey named Ernest. In this story, Ernest was lonely and wanted a friend. When a fancy show horse named Twist arrived at the farm, Ernest was overjoyed to finally have a friend. But Twist didn’t really want to be friends with a scruffy little donkey. But when Ernest was able to reach an itch that Twist couldn’t scratch, he learned to enjoy the donkey’s company and they became inseparable friends. We read this one from the library last year. It was so good that I thought it was worth buying our own copy … and the other books in the series as well. All of them are big favorites!
• Teeny Tiny Ernest, by Laura T. Barnes – Ernest is discontent about his size and keeps trying to do something to make himself taller. When his friends, find out what is bothering him, they assure him that they never even noticed that he was so short. They loved him just for who he was inside, not how big (or small he was outside).
• Ernest and the Big Itch, by Laura T. Barnes – Ernest has a big itch and finds the pole of the birdhouse to be a great place to scratch it. The birds don’t think so and try to figure out another place to scratch his itch. An excellent story about how to deal with problems in a friendly, polite way. I love the fact that the bird never talks angrily with Ernest about him shaking their nest all to pieces. We’ve had some good discussions about how to follow this example in resolving disputes and annoying situations. Also, there’s a lady bug hidden on each page and all the kids (especially Jeffrey) had fun finding it.

Activities this week:

We stayed around the house mostly this week. It was cold and rainy a lot of the week. I didn’t take any pictures. We did go out to Wal-mart and Kroger on Thursday – in the cold rain –shows you how desperate I was to get out of the house and have some kind of diversion.

We worked on “fine motor skills” this week. Translated, that means :

• Jeffrey put Duplo Lego blocks together (it takes some effort, but he can finally get the blocks together).
• Travis worked on making a “stable” and “manger” out of cardboard, using scissors to cut the cardboard. He spent many of his nap times working on that. He also worked on coloring – he’s getting really good at staying in the lines and picking appropriate colors for different parts of the picture.
• Heather worked on coloring (she’s getting better at staying somewhat near the lines) and cutting pieces of paper into tiny little bits. Since she likes to do that so much, I got a workbook that has things to cut out to develop scissor skills so that she would have something productive (in my mind) to do while having fun cutting.