Atrion's First Official Day at Preschool

It has been a long time since I have blogged due to having a new baby and a 4 year old to chase after. I was talking to my sister in law Shelby about blogging and that I have an illness in which I can't just pick up blogging without recapping EVERYTHING that has happened in between posts. This makes it so I just don't blog because it would be too much and I have not enough precious time to devote to that. So I have been pondering that and am going to just jump in with what I did today and perhaps I will go back later and blog about Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, various birthdays and such. But today is about Atrion.

Cody and I have been contemplating homeschooling since Atrion turned 3. I have been flip-flopping on whether I can handle this task. Some days I feel I can and some days I feel that its too much for both me and Atrion. I am going to give it a shot with Pre-K up until its time for him to start Kindergarten and we will see how we feel about it then. I want him to have the same public school experience that I did: wonderful friends and teachers, amazing experiences, lots of learning and feeling good about myself. I cherish my memories of my school days. I didn't like waking up in the morning. I think that was my only negative about it. However, I am aware that my school experience is actually quite rare. I have a friend who had a learning disability and while I was getting nominated as Principal's Pride and being in the gifted/talented program and having all sorts of positive attention from my teacher, she was feeling ostracized and humiliated for not being able to read as well as everyone due to dyslexia. Other kids are bullied; some are bullies. Some give in to peer pressure. Some kids lose more of their innocence by attending public school. Swear words, sex ed, pornography, drugs...these are all things I learned about on the school bus. I was taught that these things were wrong at home and in church so for the most part I was able to ignore them and continue on in my sweet innocence, but I worry that it is too much for today. That is my fear. I don't worry about the education that teachers will provide, because I trust teachers and love them for what they do. It's the other kids I worry about.
So anyway...that's my why of homeschooling. I just need to figure out the how.

Here are some pictures of Atrion's and my first day of preschool. We started with the letter "H". We will work on this letter all week long. He immediately identified the letter and we talked about the sound it makes. Then he glued the pre-cut hearts onto it. I told him that "h" sounds like "Huh" and showed him that if he holds his hand up to his mouth he can feel the breath on it when he makes the sound.

He worked on identifying the letter while I got the rest of my lesson ready.

 He was talking to whole time to me about big letters and little letters and was just so happy and cheery.

 Completed!

 He did a great job at writing the letters too.

 Then we did a craft project of a hippo. He got to glue mini marshmallows for the hippos teeth.

 We watched a short video on Hippos and he was so into it. He was able to recall what they eat (grass), and that they have large teeth that hurt really bad if they bite you. He correctly chose which food from the choices below the hippo would prefer to eat. He even fed the grass to the "hungry hippo".

 Then we hung him up and made the grass his hair.

I didn't get pictures of the next part, but we had a scavenger hunt where he went into his room and brought me back some toys that started with the letter "h". He brought me the Hulk, Hobbes his tiger, and some play food of a hot dog and hamburger. He also had a few wrong choices in their too like tomato and Captain America, but he did really well. The lesson went a lot faster because he grasped everything so quickly. We are going to keep working on this letter throughout the rest of the week. Tomorrow we are going to make "Heart Hats" out of paper plates and work on math a little bit. I am excited about this and he is too. He didn't want to be done until I pulled out more practice sheets for him to write his letters on. Then he decided he wanted to watch a show. :) 

In short: Day 1=SUCCESS!