Pre-Kindergarten (October)

October was a month of a lot of staying in bed to conserve energy while reading to do school. I had a conversation with a dear friend and a seasoned home schooler who reminded me that at this age, reading and being read to is enough of ‘school’. Every now and then, I find myself needing that reality check.

So here is a photo dump of what we did in October.

Art/Nature-

                                        

                                    

For art, we started some sort of structured drawing lessons following increasingly difficult steps to complete a picture of different animals. When I say “we”, I mean “we”. Side note, I wated to be an artist growing up but sense prevailed and I chose a different path. However, I believe somewhere in a confused isolated optimistic and often lonely corner of my heart, that I can get a do over with this. So here’s to homeschooling myself with art and cheering for second chances. Ahna grew in leaps and bounds over a few sessions and I was, least to say, amazed. She also had a few opportunities to pain without me around(which means she could make a mess and do whatever she liked with the tools given) under her dads supervision, and she actually came up with quite a few creative pieces of work. Another day homeschooling myself and learning something new. We did one picture for art study and she found it quite interesting. She loves doing art study through the books we have.

We continued our nature group (although I have no pictures for it, tis true). We started back our garden! The last couple of months of my pregnancy pushed me to close down the garden and let it grow wildly. I could not care for it so I killed everything and started fresh this month. I’m excited for our garden this year and have lots of plans for how it should shape up and what new things I’d like to grow. It is so encouraging to see Hope, my 2 year old being able to identify cucumber seeds. However, the truth might be she knows it from EATING cucumbers instead of sowing the seeds, but I’d like to credit our gardening efforts to this particular learning.

Reading 

       

             

We have started with reading marathons. I read to her and she reads to me. We are quite enjoying it and will continue this practice because I think it helps us with consistency for her reading.

I write this blog primarily for myself, and what I am about to write, is something I want to work hard on remembering. So here is a record of the happenings one fine afternoon as we sat to do our reading marathon. I was expecting Ahna to breeze through the Bob books at her usual pace. This afternoon was different though. She paused long and hard on one page of her book. It puzzled me first, then irritated me and then almost angered me to a point where I was about to say something undignified and not sweet as honey when I asked her “what’s the matter ahna?” and I looked into her book to see this particular page had 2 lines instead of the usual 1. And she did not know how to read both the lines. Ding Ding Ding! At any given time during our school, Ahna is working hard on contemplating this new language and reading these foreign squiggles that she now identifies as letter sounds but she is still learning so much more each day about READING. full stops, commas, question marks, capitals in names, lines, exclamation marks! These are all things we have gone over and learnt in our home ed and none of them have anything to do with decoding sounds and reading words. I was humbled that day and so happy I get to go through this journey with my little ones. These moments are refining and convicting and I’m thankful for them after the first 10 minutes of being deeply ashamed.

WRITING and BIBLE NARRATIVE 

Since we had not practiced much writing over the past couple of months, Ahna lost her refined grip and control. So we did some basic tracing activities to get her started and then continued with her writing books. She also wrote a letter to nana and nani to welcome them to Goa for their visit.

We also read a couple chapters from her bible for her to narrate back to me.

        Here is a picture of my little one wanting to do school. She takes cutting paper very seriously. She is actually learning her letters, numbers and cutting skills. Her pincer grip is good but tracing is a little while away. She does not enjoy books as much as Ahna even though she likes the experience of being read to.

Bye bye folks, See you soon for an update on November.