March weeks 1 and 2

I know that I had a good excuse to NOT do preschool, but I've made a commitment to myself to stick with this and I really want to see it through. (I have a list of major failings in my personal character and lack of consistency is one, thus the drive to keep going this time.)  So, lest the blogging community is led to believe I have taken a break from preschool, I offer the following examples of our "work."

We've been learning the letter "D" by making for each child a "dies und das" Kiste. (a this and that box).  As you can see, hot glued to the box are examples of this and that, and should one open the door of the box by pushing in the right spot (drucken) one would find more examples of dies und das.   This was as major hit. I'm glad I thought of this idea. 

We've been also learning the letter "E" by making an E mobile.  If I were to do this again, which I'm sure I will, I would do it differently. In German the letter E makes three sounds, E and is elephant, E as in the a in ankle, and E as in "eye". I thought for some crazy reason we should at least mention all three E sounds. Therefore, our mobile has three strings, one for each phoneme with three selected words and corresponding pictures. Too much information. Next time I will just stick with E as in Elephant.

We've started our transportation unit, and are actually half way done. First we got the transportation story kit from the library. It was ok, and we had a few coloring pages to go with it. Then we moved onto airplanes. We learned the parts of an airplane, colored an airplane, and the most fun of all, we built a small cheap-o wood model airplane and helicopter with Dad and painted them with Grammy. Painting was probably the most fun because it was so warm outside. ah spring... almost.  We flew around and pretended we were airplanes too.

Then we moved onto Trains. The train story kit at the library was much better than the transportation kit, at least in my opinion. The favorite story was "The Little Engine That Could" which I didn't even both to translate into German... some things (many things) are just better in their original language. you know, like "i think i can, i think i can, i think i can." My amateur translation would have been something like "ich schaff' es schon, ich schaff es schon, ich schaff' es schon" (roughly translated "i can do it" or "i'll get it yet" sort of). This prompted the idea that we would make our own paper train and use it to mark our progress on a specific goal - such as not talking when it is time to go to sleep. For each day/night that the children reach their goal or whatever, they get to pick another car to put on the train. We have a locomotive, 7 cars, and a caboose. Finally the tenth time they succeed, we put up a star and then they get to do something fun that they pick. so far the first fun thing on the list is go to Grammy's and watch 101 Dalmations. Joshua said I could come too, which I thought was very kind of him.  No pictures of the train yet, seeing as the kids have yet to actually go to sleep. that is a subject for another post. (angry face).

Just FYI, another really good train book - for English speakers - is Jingle the Brass by someone I forgot. And another book called something like "what's in a freight train" was very enlightening. I'm sure you can guess what is in a cattle car, or a stock car, or even a boxcar and tanker, but do you know which car is the gondola or the hopper? Thanks to "What's in a freight train" I do. (all the sudden I'm starting to hear music... butterfly in the sky, I can fly twice as high) ok, enough with the book reviews. In another book they mentioned semaphores and how the engineer can look at a semaphore and know whether to keep going, slow down, or stop. Joshua caught quickly on to that, and now whenever he is holding anything resembling a stick he holds it straight up and says, "now the train can go" or holds hit horizontally and informs me the train has to stop now.

 reading the train books

No, I am not ashamed of the hot glue gun in the back - in my opinion, that is the only way to make these little models. I threw the little nails away.

What else, we build trains but we haven't painted them yet. We have a train coloring page but we haven't colored it yet. Oh yes, and while we were making our St. Patrick's Day cookies, we also made railroad crossing cookies. I have no idea what the signs look like in Germany, but I figured my kids don't actually live in Germany so it would be more practical to learn what the RR crossing sign looks like here. The cookies were a cute idea, even if the cookies themselves didn't turn out so cute.

There were a lot of songs and poems and other cute ideas I got from the story kits at the library, but in the end I didn't feel like translating a bunch of songs, etc. That's not to say I'm not going to try next month, but this month it just seemed a little too much. I did just have a baby 5 weeks ago and I don't feel guilty taking things a little slower... just as long as I keep going :)

I have a couple more train activities to do, and then we will move on to boats. I'm really excited for boats, just because we are going to make boats and see if we can sail them somewhere - last year we did this down at Salem Pond, but I really really don't want to drive all the way down there - it would probably take about 45 minutes one way. so... any suggestions?