Stress-Free, Mess-Free Preschool

Some of the techniques I use to make our preschool day one that's stress-free and mess-free:

1. I tackle the harder tasks, that require more concentration and energy, first. For my girls, these are reading and handwriting. I leave the more "fun stuff" for later in each school day in order to motivate them. No one wants to do all the fun stuff first and then have the hardest tasks hanging over you for the rest of the school day.

2. Before the girls arrive, I lay everything I want to do out on the table, and then as we finish each book or activity, I put it away. This means that I don't struggle with forgetting the activities I had planned (everything is on the table--how can I forget it when I see it!) and there's no big mess at the end of preschool (everything has been put back in its place as soon as we are finished with it).

3. I do all painting projects with the girls on my bathroom floor. I have a "wet bathroom", meaning that the entire tiled room is designed to be a shower. I just use the showerhead to wash any accidental paint smears off the floor later.

4. Since there are two of them, I sometimes give them small tasks of doing review work with their classmate. I will have one hold up the number flashcards for the other, and then switch places. This gives them a fun feeling of ownership--they have to be paying attention to make sure that their classmate says the right number, and it also gives me a few free minutes to prepare the next activity or get some housework done.

5. I only work on each subject for a pretty short period of time, and on the whole, unless I'm interrupted, I offer no breaks. My "break" strategy is to cycle between a variety of activities--because if I just let them go free, it's not the easiest thing to get them back into learning mode.

6. We do our reading on the comfy couch, but there are no crayons or markers allowed in the room with the couch. We have separate spaces for our writing activities and our reading activities, to prevent artwork on the furniture. 

7. We go over the rules for school in the elevator on the way to class. The biggest one is that during school, "I listen with my eyes, I listen with my ears, and I listen with my heart."

8. Because I use Youtube videos and a game from a website, I have them all cued up and the computer on when the girls arrive. Simply the time that it takes to search and find a video or deal with a computer game loading can be enough to lost attention, so I find everything works smoothly because I have the technology prepped ahead of time.

Week 6:

Major Themes: The Letter A and Animals

Notebooks: 
-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.
-Practiced writing names.
-Practiced writing upper and lowercase letters with workbooks
-This week we focused on the letter A and had several associated activities:
  -Found things in the house that started with the 'A' sound.
  -Asked, "Does your name have the letter A in it?" Anna felt really special this week!
  -Listened to this Letter A song.
  -Made the letter A with playdough.
  -Practiced writing uppercase and lowercase As every day.
  -Cut apples in half and used them as paint stamps. As far as I can remember, I have never actually done any fruit or veggie stamping in my life, even though I know it's practically the most common craft ever, so I was pretty excited about this. The girls thought it was kind of crazy to paint with applies instead of a paintbrush...
  -We made a simple ant craft that required cutting and gluing on their part.

Math:
-Number flashcards up to 20. We do a lot of different activities with flashcards--I throw them all on the floor and they have to give me the flashcard I ask for. Or I line up the flashcards in random order and they have to stand on a flashcard when I call out a number. Or they have to put all the flashcards in appropriate numerical order themselves. I try not to ever let things get too monotonous.
-Practiced writing numbers on whiteboard
-1-10 Dot-to-dot sheets
-Counting blocks and making simple patterns

Reading:
-Books 1 and 2 from Sonlight's Fun Tales.
-We used our letter flashcards to practice sounding out CVC words that we've gone over in the previous 5 weeks.
-Teach Your Monster to Read for 5-10 minutes a day.
-Sight words: is, to, and has.

Bible and Storytime: Week 6 from Sonlight Core P4/5 Instructor's Guide.

Months of the Year: We use this song.

7 Continents of the World: Something new that they've started memorizing this week! They had their days of the week down, so now we're memorizing the seven continents with this song.

Science: Animals
- Talked about different kinds of animals: wild animals vs. domesticated animals
- Did a very basic intro to different groupings of animals, i.e. mammals, insects, reptiles, amphibians

Storybooks: Crictor by Tomi Ungurer
-This story was perfect for a discussion of what kind of animals make good pets and which kind don't--Crictor is obviously a pretty unusual pet.
The Complete Adventures of Curious George by Margret and H.A. Rey
-We read several stories from this anthology and talked a lot about this crazy monkey.
-A lot of the illustrations have different animals pictures in them, so we pointed out the animals in the drawings and called them by their Bahasa names.

Bahasa: 
We worked on expanding our animal vocab:

Fish = Ikan
Lion = Singa
Snake = Ular
Gajah = Elephant
Frog = Katak
Horse = Kuda
Ant= Semut

-We reviewed old animal vocabulary words from Week 3 as well.
-We looked through the animal pages of our Bahasa/English picture dictionary.
-We also listened to the Didi and Friends song Semut Berkawad. Since it's all about marching ants, this was a perfect crossover for our letter of the week!
-We watched this short, 4-minute, Didi episode about ants and how strong they are and how they use teamwork to lift heavy things.

Life skills: 
-They helped me put laundry in the washing machine and fold and put it away.

Crafts + Play:
-I taught them one of the "clapping games" I played as a kid. This should really go under life skills, shouldn't it? I clapped this rhyme with them, I know there's lots of variations, but this is how I learned it (it seems to be a rather violent version):
"Miss Suzy had a baby,
She named him Tiny Tim.
She put him in a bathtub,
To see if he could swim.
He drank up all the water,
He ate up all the soap.
He tried to eat the bathtub
but it wouldn't go down his throat.
Miss Suzy called the doctor,
Miss Suzy called the nurse,
Miss Suzy called the lady with the alligator purse.
"Measles" said the doctor.
"Mumps" said the nurse.
"Nothing," said the lady with the alligator purse.
Miss Suzy kicked the doctor.
Miss Suzy punched the nurse.
Miss Suzy thanked the lady with the alligator purse."

Previous Weeks: 
Week 1
Week 2
Week 3
Week 4
Week 5