Preparing for School...

We are enjoying the last few weeks before school. I can't imagine what it's going to be like next year when she actually starts Kindergarten! I'm pretending that it's never going to happen. But she will be in pre-school again this year -- and is actually ready for it. Every few days she'll ask "when does school start mommy?". So, I decided that since this week was a "slow" week for us I would get her "back in the groove" a little and start with a refresher about her letters, sitting and reading, drawing, and a little "lower case letter" practice. She looked at me one day and said "when can we play"..... so I know that being @ school for 3 hours is something she's going to have to get used to again. (And can only imagine what WHOLE day school is going to do to her next year). But I think she's had a lot of fun this week with her "school-work" and so I thought I'd share a little bit of what we've done.

She LOVES the book "The Tiny Seed" .. we read it often. So I thought I'd start by reading it and talking about plants & seeds & how they grow. And helped her learn to read some of the small words in the book...she even drew a picture of the seed from "blowing in the wind" - to turning into a HUGE flower after settling to the ground, being rained on & had enough sun. I thought it was darn good drawing if I do say so!

Some of you may know that Anne Marie has a LOVE for horses. It all started @ my Aunt & Uncles house. They have 3 horses -- and had a pony -- that Anne Marie got to ride. Since then, we've taken her to a horse show, Mike has made her a barn & bought her small horse figures to live in it & in Lancaster, PA she got her fill of horses. So one day we looked up all kinds of information on the Internet about horses -- what they are like when they are babies & what they eat and so on. Mike had bought her this little ceramic horse paint set a while back and I decided it would be a perfect time to get them out & paint them. Her pony was quite colorful! She even drew a picture of a horse (with a little help from tracing the legs off her horse that goes in the barn Mike made her) and a bale of hay & things a horse might eat.

The tomatoes we planted are almost ready to pick, and we went out to water them one day. Anne Marie was asking if they were seeds like flowers, so I thought it would be cute to do a 'garden day'. I got out another one of her books and we made a lunch from all the things that would grow in a garden. We had berries, cucumber sandwiches, celery w/ peanut butter, and cherry-lime-aid-mommy-style (you know limes, lemons & cherries all grow on trees -- even if it is a stretch it worked...and it helped me get to make one of my favorite drinks ..hee) Then we looked up online what all these plants looked like when they grew in the garden. She was most fascinated with the peanuts and wheat...probably because she's seen most of the other things in a real garden. She even was asking today "mommy how do you make flour from wheat again?"