Preschool Resources

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I made a list for a friend of many of the resources I use for at-home school with PB, who is currently 4 and two years away from kindergarten. Thought I would share.

Books:

Creative Resources for the Early Childhood Classroom By Judy Herr:  I bought a past edition off amazon for the cost of shipping.  The book organizes activities based on themes. It has art projects, finger plays, sensory activities, music, and more. It is probably what I use the most to plan our school.

Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons: My mom had this book growing up. I remembered it. I’m 18 lessons in teaching PB to read and we are enjoying it. It is helping PB get used to a little more structure than we often have, and as a side benefit I think it is also helping Mr. C in his language as he listens to us. A lesson takes around 15 minutes, it is phonetically based. PB was ready for it at four. And he is learning to read quite rapidly, just doing one lesson a day.

Activity Blogs:

Fun at Home with Kids: This blog is very popular, and for good reason. Her kids are similar in age to my own, and she has a lot of fun activities and ideas.

Growing a Jewled Rose: More fun activities, and check out the baths too.

Play Create Explore: This one isn’t updated anymore, but has tons of fun ideas in the history:

No Time for Flashcards: This one had more traditional educational activities on it, along with book recommendations.

Other Websites:

Teacher Tom: I read this blog for a while. It has some preschool activities, lots of thoughts on preschool development and some political posts.

Printable Packs: I print out packs here. There is also a link to simpler tot books at the end of the page.

Here’s 71 Things Your Child Needs to Know Before Kindgarten

I also sometimes look up Montessori and like activities, although haven’t found a website or source that I always got back too.

I’ve never felt the need to buy a more formal curriculum (well except the book listed above). I try to keep a play-based environment, and lately we have room devoted to school activities. There are many more resources out there, but this is what I use and give anyone interested a place to start. Hope it helps!

Smiles

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Sometimes I forget to look at my kids. When I do, their faces show annoyance, sadness, disappointment. C’s face often has me running for a tissue. But many times they are full of joy: unblemished smiles full of love. Being able to create these smiles as I play with them is the best feeling in the world.

smile

Pictures from a Walk

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Occasionally it is fun to take pictures of what has gone horribly wrong in landscapes. These pictures are from a walk a couple weeks ago. It is far easier in my community to find pictures of blunders than to find a unique, good looking garden. All of these pictures happened in a two block radius.

So here, are the my top five landscape blunders where I live, with a few extra bonuses thrown in.

1) Pruning
I have no idea why everybody hedges everything. If you are buying pruning equipment, it is far more beneficial to buy a pair of loppers than hedging shears, and actually learn how to prune a shrub. It is far less work. This pictures is an especially bad example.
blunder1

2) Weed Trees
We have a lot of trees. The maples, london plane trees, fruit trees, are all nice. But there is huge prevelance of siberian elms, tree of heaven, and seedling locust. These trees are weeds. This picture is not especially good, but it is common to fine a back empty space covered in weedy trees. My current home has a Siberian Elm, my last had tree of heaven.
blunder3

3) Lack of Mulch
Bare soil surrounds flowers, and then up comes the weeds. Or it is just bare soil, like this picture, which is not especially lovely. What happened to using a good organic mulch? Wood chips, leaf mulch, pine needles, compost, anything. It will keep the weeds down, and make the place look much better.
blunder7

4)Weeds
I think foxtail barley is in heaven here. I am pretty sure it thrives in the irrigation water. It was a battle to fight with it in my garden, but if it is continually allowed to go to seed, it will always be a problem.
blunder4

5)Landscape Fabric
It will just look awful in a few years. And it doesn’t necessarily keep down the weeds.
blunder6

Bonuses:

Cement tree ring: No idea why these exsist. In a few years they always look like this. A tree needs far more room than a two foot circle anyway.
blunder2

Chainsawed trees: This is not how you prune trees.
blunder5

 

Halloween

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A witch came to our house and left behind an icky potion filled with eyes. PB and Mr. C fiddled with the potions and managed to turn Mommy into a cat, dog, wolf, and elephant. Luckily it didn’t last.

soup

(Credit to Fun At Home for the idea)

The next day, a vampire left behind a gross treat of bloody animals. Even C thought this was icky. (Unflavored gelatin is disgusting.)

gelatin

The kids dressed up, and ate too much candy. We went to four festivals/trick or treats, and one party at friends, along with traditional trick or treating.

heroes2

heroesThe kids were excited the first time they put on costumes. They wouldn’t hold still for a good picture. But then we lost the robin mask, and PB only put on his costume when he had too. And really, these are the same costumes we used last year. My kids aren’t into dressing up, which mostly means less work for me.

 

Moved

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We moved. And closed on our house. In that order. We had been waiting on a USDA loan, which was already going to take two months. And then the government shutdown, so it took even longer. We decided to just move so we could hopefully rent out our apartment sooner, and so we weren’t in limbo anymore. But then, two days after we moved in, the loan finally went through and we closed on the house.

We moved three blocks, and Joe and I did almost all of the moving with a pick-up truck and a day off of work. We worked our tails off for a few days to clean a house, apartment, move, and unpack.

Here’s the new house:

home

And guess what? Two of those awful arborvitae are already gone. And 33 cats from next door.

Picture Montage

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At PB’s birthday party. C is holding tightly to that balloon. He likes balloons. 
birthday

The garden is no more. The massive dirt play space is back.
garden
there

Giant Lego tower built by Joe loved by PB
legos

PB took this photo. Not bad. And you can notice my laziness: C is wearing two different shoes. They were out. Didn’t feel like going to the closet to get a matching set.
shoes

End of Garden

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I got tired of waiting for it to freeze and went and ripped out the garden. Green tomatoes are now ripening more quickly indoors. The kids like the hills created to furrow irrigated the garden and drive bulldozers and dump tracks up and down them.

garden
there

The garden was fun this year, but I was getting a little tired of weeds and cucumbers.

Screaming Toodlers

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Yesterday, I was in the check-out line at the grocery store. The lady a couple people behind me had an older toddler that was screaming. When I put my groceries in the car, she was actually parked next to me and came out, still with a screaming toddler in tow. We had a short conversation.

Mom of toddler: “I’m sorry about him.”

Me: “My kids do it to. It’s hard.” (And in fact the only reason they were currently behaving is they were given candy.)

The whole experience got me thinking. I have been on the other side with a kid who is making this gigantic scene while I am surrounded by strangers. I have tried to be the best mom I can be and sometimes all the kids do is complain and throw ginormous fits in the worst possible places, or not listen and call me names. It’s embarrassing, disappointing, and even thinking about it now makes me want to cry. For me, children have brought out a new intensity of anger, frustration and sadness than I even dealt with as a teenager. Sometimes, being a mom just sucks.

And I realized that it’s normal. No one thinks you are a bad mom (and if they do they aren’t right). Being a mom is super hard and there often isn’t anything different you can do that you aren’t already doing. Children are just sometimes a pain, because they haven’t grown up. Yet we have to develop expectations and limits because we do love them. And that can lead to demoralizing situations, as our kids call us poopy yet again, fail to listen, or scream for almost an hour.

I drove home. Mr. C had been whining all day. He continued. But I was able to deal with it because I had realized that it wasn’t my fault, and it is just hard sometimes to raise children.

Sometimes moms don’t need advice on how to deal with kids, but simply a reminder that kids are hard to deal with. And we love them anyway. It is super awesome to see a person grow up, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. The good sweet moments do come along with the hard ones.

Anyway, I am grateful to that mom with a screaming toddler. She helped me be more able to deal with my own rambunctious kids, and remember why I am doing what I’m doing.