My Little Preschooler

Ramona has been attending a neighborhood preschool called The Ranch Preschool with Miss Jamie for about a month now. She of course loves the social aspect of school best, but I can tell she is learning a lot, too.

 

 

Having preschool just a couple of blocks from our house means we get to commute by foot, bike, or stroller most days. One day I packed the girls a lunch and we walked to the park afterward. Ramona buzzed her letter B bee all the way there.

The next day was the Teddy Bear Picnic at school, where the kids got to take their favorite stuffed bear and a lunch packed with letter "B" foods.

 

A few days later, Ramona had yet another picnic after school. This one was on our front porch with her classmate Kieran, who is our neighbor and one of Ramona's bike buddies.

 

All of the classroom photos are courtesy of Miss Jamie, who is wonderful about documenting and sharing what goes on at preschool.

 

 

This past Thursday was hat day in honor of the letter H. On the same day, Ramona was also in charge of "the Guessing Bag." This meant she got to choose an item whose name starts with the designated letter of the week, include 3 clues, and let classmates try to guess the item. When she was trying to decide which object to take, I suggested a handkerchief, a plastic hot dog, or a headband--and of course she chose the shiny pink headband.

What a diva.

Another great thing about this preschool is that I get to teach a little music class there once a week (in exchange for a tuition discount, hooray!)

This has been an exciting opportunity for me, as I get to develop a preschool music curriculum from scratch AND spy on my child in the classroom on a regular basis. As an added bonus, I get to bring Mika along just for the duration of music time, so she gets a little taste of preschool as well.

In addition to the standard singing and finger plays, I have been experimenting with teaching musical notation. At this point, we have just distinguished between quarter notes and half notes and talked about how notes can move "upstairs" or "downstairs." In one class period, I let the kids glue note heads onto a staff to "compose" their own song, then played each composition in the next class. Some of the songs required more interpretation than others, but each was wonderfully unique and interesting to me.

School year: So far, so good.