A is for Abbey

Today we started Mommy School. I'm trying out this home preschool kind of setup to help get Abbey ready for preschool in the fall and to try my hand at home schooling and see if and how we both like it. In Mommy School, we're mostly focusing on letters and basic math. She's got most everything down and I'm confident she'll learn all that in her preschool. She has shown interest in learning to read and write so I want to foster that now rather than wait for her teachers to do it.
For our first lesson we learned about the letter A and the number 3. She worked on handwriting a capital and lowercase A, we learned a bible verse, we read a book, she worked on the number 3, and she made a book of colors. I'll put links below of my resources, but first here are some pictures!

The Mommy School Board. The letter A and the apple are connected using velcro and each week when we change letters and themes, I'll be able to quickly switch them out. The baggy in the upper right hand corner has popsicle sticks and pipe cleaners so she can practice building the letters.

Abbey's first attempt at building an A.

Handwriting Practice: Big and Little A

Apple Math: Painting 3 apples on the tree

We lasted about 20 minutes at the table, which is honestly more than I expected. Once she saw that we were painting, any patience I hoped for during handwriting was out the window. When she was done, she said, "I'm tired. Cake time?" Though she did not get any cake, we did go on a walk for muffins. I think it's going to be important to go at her pace for the first while so she doesn't start to feel like this is her job. I want this to be a fun experience for her and I don't want her to feel pushed. After today, I've learned a lot that I'll change for tomorrow-like hiding the supplies until it's time to bring them out. Gathering just 2 days worth of materials was a lot of work-I definitely have more respect for homeschool Mommas after just 1 day of doing this! It was fun work though, and work that I think will pay off. I'll post another update after Day 2 tomorrow!

Have any of you done at home preschool type things? What did you find worked best?

Here are the resources I used:

Handwriting worksheet and Apple Math worksheet

Apple Colors Book

Book-I Am an Apple by Jean Marzollo

Verse-Psalm 17:8

My Summer of Judging Books by Their Covers

One of my favorite things about summer is having more time to read for leisure. This summer, I'm going to challenge myself to read at least 26 books. I'm going to work through the alphabet and read one book from each category. So, this week I chose a book from the "A" authors. Part of the challenge, is that I'm going to only pick books based on their covers. Going against the old adage, "You can't judge a book by its cover". 

The first book is The Lake, the River, and the Other Lake by Steve Amick.

When I'm done reading each book, I'll give a short review. This should be interesting.