Home Preschool Week in Review {God is Good & Letter A}
We had another fun week of learning together. Here’s what we did this week.
For Bible time and character training, we use the Fruit of the Spirit Curriculum.
Memory Verse: Psalm 34:8a
Bible: Read and Learn Bible, pages 14-23, Creation of Adam and Eve and the Fall of Man
This week of the Fruit of the Spirit Curriculum was so much fun. When I wrote the lesson plan, I couldn’t wait to get started. This week was heavy on role-play, which isn’t something I’m very good at. However, my son LOVED it, and now I’m looking for more ways to bring the Bible alive in similar ways.
First, we made finger puppets of Adam and Even that I downloaded from Christian Preschool Printables. We taped them onto large craft popsicle sticks to make them a little more durable and easy to handle for little hands.
We role-played what it must have been like in the Garden of Eden when God created them. We used our Creation crafts from a previous week as props. We walked through all the days with Adam and Eve, and exclaimed together about the goodness of God.
On another day, we made the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil out of card stock, toilet paper rolls, and some paint.
We role-played the story again, and then my son thought it would be a good idea to add animals to the garden so Adam could name them.
These are the same animals that we used in our lesson last week with Noah’s ark. It was fun to watch him go around and name the animals, and Eve later came along to tell him he did a fantastic job. 😉
On another day, we made a paper chain snake. I chose two different colors to make our snake so we could work on making patterns. After we had our snake, we were ready for the final scene in our story. We acted out the snake tempting Eve and the subsequent entry of sin into this perfect world.
Afterward, we grabbed some brown felt to clothe Adam and Eve. This was my son’s idea, and it’s not listed in the curriculum. I think it’s a great addition though!
Throughout the week, we talked about God as a good God. We memorized Psalm 34:8a, and really just enjoyed the lesson overall.
We use God’s Little Explorers Preschool Curriculum for our base guide to lead us through the alphabet and additional preschool theme work.
This week’s letter was A and the theme was Apple. I already had a lot of material for letter A so I didn’t really follow God’s Little Explorers Preschool Curriculum suggestions very closely when it came to letter work. I just used what I already had on hand that I knew my son would enjoy.
I went back to using our letter sensory bins this week. Sam really enjoys these so it was fun exploring the bin with him a few times throughout the week.
He requested his do-a-dot markers one day, which was nice because I already had some worksheets printed off.
Once we rolled through all the worksheets I had, he still wanted to make dots. So I gave him a piece of construction paper to continue creating.
I’ve had these apple printables from 1+1+1=1 for a couple of years now. You can see them in use in our autumn theme post and apple theme post from last year, but this was the first time we did the apple sequencing cards from the packet. He loved this!
Shadow matching apples was another fun activity. We did this several times before he tired of it.
We also did apple shape matching activity, which he always enjoys. It was a good reminder to me that I need to continue reinforcing shapes with him. He mixed up the names of several of them (e.g., He said octagon instead of rectangle), but it’s just because we haven’t reviewed them in a while.
After we finished our shapes, he said, “Let’s make letters with this yarn!” He had been playing with yarn earlier in the morning and there were a few scraps on the table. I pulled out some sandpaper for him to work on, and he loved making all the letters he could think of. I love his eagerness to learn, and he is fascinated with making letters right now.
I already had these play dough mats from a previous apple themed week that we didn’t get to. I pulled them out this week to go along with the book, Ten Red Apples by Pat Hutchins.
Initially, I had him making balls for the apples. After a few minutes of obliging, he remembered he had “something in his bucket.” We keep play dough and some cookie cutters readily available. I didn’t even remember we had an apple cookie cutter. He pulled it out and continued to make the remaining apples from the cookie cutter.
We use All About Pre-Reading for our phonics work.
We did our lowercase letter a work from All About Pre-Reading. It fit nicely with our theme, and he loved coloring the worksheet with markers instead of crayons. We also added apples using a q-tip and some paint. He continues to love anything we do with the All About Pre-Reading program.
Other fun preschool things we did …
I bought four different kinds of apples at the grocery store one day, and for snack, we did an apple taste test. Daddy joined us which was a nice treat.
I helped Sam fill out the graph from God’s Little Explorers Preschool Curriculum printables as we went along.
As he tasted the apples, he had to tell us if they were crunchy or soft, sweet or sour, etc. Golden Delicious apples were my favorite, as well as my husband’s. Sam really liked Gala apples. I think it’s because they are what he’s used to eating. I buy them because they are generally the cheapest! And none of us like McIntosh apples. We didn’t even finish the apple.
One day we went outside on the deck with a couple of board games. We played Hi Ho Cherry O and Thomas Making Tracks games. While we played, we had three hummingbirds come to our feeder. It was fun to observe them while using our “nature voices.” I couldn’t get a decent picture with my phone though, which was sad.
Since we had beautiful weather this week, we tried to get outside as much as we could. I took our story stones outside for the boys to play with together. It’s fun to see what Sam comes up with. I hope to share more about our story stones soon.
Sam is a huge bookworm. He will sit for hours and let us read him stories, and he can often be found hunkered down beside the bookshelf “reading” stories to himself. The sight of him quietly reading never gets old.
I took Sam on a “date” to the library one day while his brother napped. I try to take him away for one on one time at least once a month.
After enjoying stories in the library, we walked down to the river. Sam threw rocks while I just sat and breathed in the crisp fall air. Being in nature always recharges me, and I was thankful for an empty river bank. The time between summer and winter is a nice respite from tourists in our little resort town. I just breathed and rested while Sam threw rock after rock after rock.
I try to give the boys a sensory activity every day. It’s the one time in the day they are in one spot and relatively quiet. I will take whatever mess they make for a few moments to rest my mommy brain. They love their sensory bins, and I love making the bins for them. It’s fun watching them discover and play together.
This bin has oats, cinnamon, cinnamon sticks, pom poms and fake apples. They loved it and played for nearly an hour together.
In Our Book Bin this Week
We read A LOT of books! Our favorite this week Ten Red Apples by Pat Hutchins, but we had several more in our book bin.
Apples and Pumpkins
Up, Up, Up! It’s Apple-Picking Time
Ten Apples Up On Top!
The Seasons of Arnold’s Apple Tree
Apple Picking Time 
Red Are the Apples
One Green Apple
Dappled Apples
The Listening Walk
And that was our first official week of homeschool preschool!
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