Preschool at Home: Week 4

My thoughts on homeschooling this week delve into the interesting situation of homeschooling abroad. America is the land from which most English-language homeschooling materials are sourced, and most resources reference American things--American money, American animals, American holidays, American seasons.

Sometimes this creates a bit of a conundrum for me when it comes to planning what I want to teach my two little Malaysians. Sometimes I make executive decisions in planning to not focus on things that would be a much more real thing in the lives of American preschoolers--that aren't particularly "real" for my little girls. We celebrate Merdeka Day, not Labor Day, here (and that's why we had a 4-day school week this week). A farm in Malaysia looks very, very different than the red barns and cornfields plastered all over a unit about farm animals from the USA. Most preschoolers in the USA aren't juggling English with Bahasa and Mandarin Chinese. There will come a day when these girls need to learn more about the rest of the world, including the USA, but for now, I'm trying to keep their education close to home, so that their book-learning matches up with what they actually experience of life. For example, for this week, I'd choose a taxi craft over a tractor craft because the girls have real-life experience with taxis and NOT John Deere tractors (totally different childhood than mine--I rode green tractors in infancy).

Week 4:

Major Themes: The Letter T and Transportation

Notebooks: 
-Check the weather and mark the weather on the graph (sunny, cloudy, or rainy) each day
-Write in the number of the day on the calendar each day.
-Point out which day of the week it is.

Alphabet:
-Sang the Sing, Spell, Read, & Write letter sounds song.
-Sing the short vowels sounds song.
-Practice writing names. Anna is also writing a few words like Mom and Dad everyday.
-Practice writing upper and lowercase letters with workbooks.
-This week we focused on the letter T and had several associated activities:
  -Found things in the house that started with the 'T' sound.
  -Asked, "Does your name have the letter T in it?"
  -Listened to the Letter T Song.
  -Looked at the T page in our picture dictionary
  -We made/played with taxis.
  -Made the letter T with our bodies.
  -Made the colorful train from the book Freight Train.
  -Made the letter T with playdoh
  -Used Dad's measuring tape to measure how tall they are.

Math:
-Number flashcards up to 20
-1-10 Dot-to-dot pages
-Practiced writing numbers on whiteboard
-Math worksheet from Abeka 1st Grade Math
-Counted how many trucks, cars, and planes are in our toy collection.
-Counted blocks. Made patterns with different colored blocks.

Reading:
-Books 1 and 2 from Sonlight's Fun Tales
-Letter blends with short vowels: ta, te, ti, to, tu
-We practiced adding an end letter, too: ta-n, tu-ck, te-d, ti-n, to-t.
Both:  Teach Your Monster to Read for 5-10 minutes a day.

Bible and Storytime: Week 4 from Sonlight Core P4/5 Instructor's Guide.

Days of the Week and Months of the Year: I use this days of the week song and this months of the year song.

Science: Transportation
-Asked questions like, "If you want to go to Singapore, will you take a car, a taxi, or an airplane?" "If you want to go to Cameron Highlands, will you take a taxi, a bus, or a car?" "If you want to go to the mall, will you take a bus, a car, or a motorcycle." They were really good at this. They said that when you go to Singapore, first you take a taxi to the airport, then you take an airplane. Awesome!
-We talked about all of the vehicles that our families have.

Storybook: 
Freight Train by Donald Crews
-We made a train craft using paint (watercolor), matching the colors of our cars to the colors of the car in the book's train.
-Counted the number of cars on the train
Titch by Pat Hutchins
-Discussed all of our siblings, and compared sizes, which siblings are bigger and which are smaller.

Bahasa: 
This week's unit was on names for common vehicles:

Car = Kereta
Bus = Bas
Train = Kereta api
Airplane = Kapal terbang
Taxi = Teksi
Bicycle = Basikal

-Asked them: "Did you ride in a kereta today? A bas? A kapal terbang?'
-Read the page on vehicles in our Bahasa/English picture dictionary
-We listened to the Didi and Friends song Tayar Bas every day ("The Wheels on the Bus go 'Round and 'Round")
-Also listened to this video with Vehicle Vocabulary Words in Bahasa.

Life skills: 
-Helped me wash bok choy and potatoes.
-They helped me put laundry in the washing machine and fold and put it away.

Crafts + Play:
-Played with play-dough
-Played with Sarah's old scooter in the hallways of the apartment building. Whee!
-Visited the playroom
-Cut up empty cereal boxes (hey, don't laugh, it's fun, plus it's scissor practice)

Previous Weeks: 
Week 1
Week 2
Week 3