Preschool Routine, Mondays

ED's Monday Routine:

The idea of planning all this is so that I can change up ED's activities, keep them fresh, interesting with the minimum of thought on my part.  I expect to skip days, but then I'll just pick up on the appropriate day and continue on.  The routine is (hopefully) to make it easier on me to keep things engaging for ED.
     Mailbox Letters and Scavenger Hunt
     Montessori Activities set up
     Theme of the week begins
   
Weekly Letters
   ED is still learning letter recognition and letter sounds. When LD and DD were both little I did a LOT of scavenger hunts and outside play with them on their letters. Somehow ED hasn't gotten as much of that this past year. So, I'm instituting my weekly scavenger hunt again.  When LD and DD heard this they insisted that they be a part of that too! Of course they won't have letters -- their cards will work on addition and multiplication facts.
    If you have weekly letters... then you need a mailbox to put them in, right?

Here's the little mailbox I made for EDs weekly letters.

One of ED's tray will have letter work.  I plan generally to cover just two letters each week, but she already knows these fairly well.  She's putting sticker letters on an index card. She also matched wooden letters to these cards (didn't get a photo of that.

ED is tracing her sandpaper letters.

Scavenger Hunt!

After the scavenger hunt they mailed their letters and cards.

One last thing about the weekly mailbox letters is that I also hope to have the kids write or send drawings to one of their relatives each week. I hope to do this on Mondays.

It's always good to be active.  These hopscotch activities were a big hit!

Montessori Type Activities
     Each Monday I hope to set up a number of Montessori-related activities. These will relate to our theme as much as possible.
     A couple of years ago we covered some of the world's biomes.  We'll be doing animal habitats with ED in the coming months.  As you may have seen, I hope to include the older kids with this to a certain extent... and plan to introduce them to the idea of research and recording their findings. Anyway the kids discussed this among themselves and decided that our first few themes will be...
      oceans
      deserts
      rainforests
     

This obviously has nothing to do with the ocean, but the kids have been begging to use their test-tubes. I have been eying these for a long time (years), but they've always been out of stock.  When I saw them in stock at Oriental Trading this summer, I snapped up a set. There are four colored trays and 16 science test tubes.   

 

This week I set out themed pin punching.  DD went straight to it, but they were a bit daunting for ED who insisted on doing a smaller one.  I need to keep that in mind. I like the cute over-sized push pins Grams gave us!

 

No surprises to the blog world with this activity, but both ED and DD did this straight away.

 

We don't have the Montessori stencils, but it's been interesting that ED has found her own equivalent with this shape template.