Preschool at Home: The Little Rabbit

Last week I began homeschooling Lucy and Collin (ages 4 and 3) for preschool.  At their ages, they naturally have such a joyful approach to learning which makes this endeavor fun for all of us!  My main hopes for this year are that the kids and I will form some good habits of tending to the needs of our household together, bond over a shared joy of learning and that in the process I would gain their trust as their "teacher" for the years to come.

I chose a book called Before Five in a Row (BFIAR) to use as a framework to guide our learning times.  The concept is that each week we'll take a single children's book (most of which have been well-loved by children for many years) and read it aloud every morning.  To accompany our readings each day we will do some learning activities that relate back to the story.  I also discovered a blog called Delightful Learning  from a mom who has shared her and her children's experiences with BFIAR and pointed me to some great (free) supplemental resources online.

I thought it would be fun to share our week by week journey through "preschool at home" here on the blog, so here are some highlights from our first week with the book, The Little Rabbit by Phoebe Dunn.

 This is not a part of the the BFIAR book, but I took some inspiration from Homeschool Share and decided to focus on one letter from the alphabet along with our books each week.  This week we did "R".

The kids seemed to really enjoy snuggling up with me and our little rabbit softies for our readings each morning.

Here Lucy is making a collage with things that start with "R"- ribbon, rabbit stickers, and colored rice.

Collin proudly shows us his completed collage. : ) His favorite element was the rice.

They practiced their counting and number recognition skills by "feeding" carrots to the rabbit. This activity also came from Homeschool Share.

I don't think play-dough ever stops being fun... they enjoyed rolling it out and making rabbits and "R"s.

We finished out the week with a wonderful treat! My dear friend, Shannon arranged for us to pay a visit to a friend of hers who owns rabbits.  She and her sweet little boy shared lunch with us and then took us on our "field trip".

We had such a fun first week learning together!  We are now in the midst of enjoying our second book, Ask Mr. Bear by Marjorie Flack and look forward to sharing those highlights here next week!

xoxo,