As I hit 35, then 36, and now 37 weeks pregnant, it's become harder and harder for us to get anything "grand" and "fabulous" accomplished in the area of schooling. I'm okay with this... I've decided. I had put together a fun unit on spiders (which was last week's theme), but when it came down to it, we didn't do much. About half the library books we requested were ready when I could pick them up, so that's all we got.

Since we hadn't done any of my "lesson plans" (crafts and coloring sheets and such) by the end of the week, I decided to extend spiders into this week. A noble idea I thought... plus, I was pretty sure I wasn't going to do anything else. Still, we haven't done any other theme things. Maybe someday we'll do the plans I made. Until then, we've enjoyed the spider books we have from the library.



Aside from our plans, however, I did get to add a new activity to my arsenal. We returned a couple things to Target without a receipt a week or so back and had $30 something to spend on something. We found sheets for the kids new beds (once they are done) and let them pick their favorite, and we found a couple dollar day items. All in all, we had just a couple dollars left, so I picked up a pack of pony beads from the craft aisle.

I started out letting Tornado do whatever he wanted with the beads on the "fuzzy sticks" (anyone else still call them pipe cleaners??? It's so hard to change over!)

He really enjoyed this.

Sweet Pea had fun with it too. She threaded them on the sticks for a while, but then just enjoyed moving them from one section of her plate to the other.

Then when she was seeming done, I let her put them in the bag (little clean up trick I suppose!)

Then Tornado and I talked about patterns again. A couple times I'd see he didn't have it quite right and suggest that he check his work. He'd catch the problem and ("uh oh") pull them off to do it again. He really wanted to do the whole length!

Then we sorted out two colors from the rest.
And I introduced "estimating" with more or less. It was a lot of beads to introduce the concept with (another day this week we did it with fewer and it worked nicely!), but we grouped them together and I asked him to guess which color there were more of. He made his guess and then we counted them up. We did it with two new colors when we were done... his idea.

I don't really have official plans for the next couple weeks. I'm slowing down a bit these days and will probably focus more on this sort of thing when I have the energy and time. I do have some plans for when baby comes (and there is someone else here to help with it) though, so I'll be sharing that as I am able... assuming I am able! :)

Stop over to see other Preschool Corner posts!