Damien's First Day of School

Being part of the Schoolhouse Review Crew, I had an opportunity review a preschool curriculum for Damien.  You'll see an official review for it later on, after we've had a little more time to work with it.  Damien often hangs out with Jude during school time, but today became his Official First Day. 

On today's agenda:


Coloring.

The dinosaur was not necessarily part of the program, but a coloring sheet I had printed off for him.  Usually he likes to color while Jude is having school.  Today he had his turn first, and Jude took his during Damien's nap.








Working on our crayon grip was part of the day as well.  This is going to take a long time -- not only do his motor skills need to advance but his "I-Do-It-Myself-itis" needs to abate a little, too.

He mistook a few of the letters for numbers, but he was pretty close.  He thought the "S" was a "5," and the "O" was a "zero."









Yeah, I'm thinking it's going to be an ongoing activity.   We actually have an upcoming visit with Miss Isabel, Damien's Occupational Therapist, so we'll add "hold a crayon" to his list of things to work on.






Then we moved on to counting.  We borrowed Jude's geometry manipulatives for this.  We did counting to 10 (I was surprised how well he did!), and touched on skip-counting by twos. 

Stacking the blocks - a cube topped with a triangular prism makes a house!  10 blocks make 5 houses.  

Stacking them as high as we can.  He quickly learned that you can't balance another shape on the point of a triangle...it just slides down.

 Blue was the color for today, so we sorted out the blue shapes and played with them for a little while.  Blue spheres roll away if you're not careful! 

We started playing with them on the bucket lid to keep them corralled.

Stacking our 10 blue shapes.

 And learning that sometimes you can balance a sphere on top of a cube, but sometimes it rolls off no matter how carefully you place it.

 The shape of the day was ball.  Damien picked all the balls out of the bin, 

and played with them on the lid.

When we were all done, he even cleaned up!   Teacher's Pet!!

Photo Credit: iTunes

Each month, the program focuses on a different classical music composer or performer, to be played in the background at some point during the day.   This month is "The Three Tenors."   I chose this album because it is a classic from my childhood -- the Three Tenors are favorites of my Dad, and I remember listening to this one way back when.  Damien enjoyed them, too -- or at least he stopped to applaud with the audience at the end of each track.

We played it during schooltime.  I'm glad we did, because it made for a nice transition to "all done."  Out of music, out of time!!