A is for Apple (Pruitt Preschool)

We had a bit of a slow start to our preschool days. Lucy had a new cousin who was supposed to make her debut on our 1st day of preschool so Lucy spent the day with her Memaw while I spent the day with my nephew. Kylie decided to take her sweet time so we only got one day of preschool in our first week. We didn't mind one bit because we got to spend some time with our newest and cutest family member.

We started with our "morning meeting" (at 6pm). Our book of the week was:

Our weekly verse was "Keep God as the apple of your eye" Psalm 17:8. (I know Lucy is waaaayyyy too young for idioms, but the whole point is to fill that little mind with scripture starting now while she's very young so, mission accomplished.)

Next we painted with apple stamps.

The painting was used to make Lucy's "A" page for her alphabet book.

For snack, we made applesauce using this recipe without the sugar.

Putting in the apples

Mashing them up

1 and a half thumbs up

Next she searched for "A's" that I hid around the living room. This is now her favorite game. She found a "C" (I'm a few weeks behind on my posts) on her carseat today and got very excited.

Then we did some table work. I used some activities and printables from this site.

Same vs. Different

Saturday was Lucy's Memaw's birthday so we made a homemade apple pie just for Memaw.

Lucy thought the apple pie was delicious!

Lucy had a great time and now says, "Mommy, want to play preschool with me?". I'd say we're off to a great start!

A Meaty Secret

Jeff Pruitt, if you are reading this, exit out and forget your ever saw it. This post will not reveal a secret gift, just a cooking secret I prefer you not know. Thanks Mr. Love you!

Now that he's gone I can share my secret freely.

A few years ago I learned something very important about my husband. We were having some friends over for dinner before a church softball game. Since the boys would be playing softball, I thought we should eat something kind of light and I already had the ingredients to make Pampered Chef's 3-Cheese Garden Pizza so I thought that would be a good choice. I sliced all my veggies, mixed everything up, spread it on top, popped it in the oven, and pulled it out just as our guest were arriving. I began serving it and Jeff says, "Where's the meat?" to which I replied, "There isn't any. It's a GARDEN pizza." Then he asked, "Well then, what's the main course?" "Ummmm, your eating the main course." "But there's no meat. This is an appetizer. Main courses have meat." Lesson learned: Dinner must have meat.

That was pre-Lucy so we had millions of dollars to buy all the meat we needed for dinner. (Yes, millions!) Well now we have Lucy and 1 income and we lost all of our millions so I'm left to find ways to save on our meaty dinners. One blog I frequent says to eat 1 meatless meal per week to help save money. My 1st thought was, "Yes, that would save us money. I would only need to do that 1 time and the poor hubs would starve to death so then I'm just left feeding Lucy and myself. Cha-ching!" But then I realized that if I starve the bread-winner, there would be no more bread so Lucy and I would starve too. Hmmm no meat = no more Pruitts. My sister-in-law once told me about a book she read that said to cut the meat called for in a recipe in half. When she told me this, we both said that would never work in our families. Imagine making meat for tacos. No, no. That will never work.

Buuuuuttttttt, 1 night as I was going to make dinner, I realized I only had half a pound of hamburger meat when I needed a whole pound. What's a girl to do in this situation? I could load up the kid, drive to the store, buy the meat, load up the meat and the kid, drive home, and make dinner an hour later than usual, OR try the half the meat thing and see how it goes. Bet you can't guess which one I chose... Half pound of meat it is! So I made my meal and guess what... no one starved! We all had plenty to eat plus leftovers and no one could tell a difference. I couldn't even tell a difference. So I tried it again the next night, with chicken. It worked again. So I kept trying different recipes using half of the meat called for in the recipe, including with tacos, and we're all still here so I'd say the little experiment was a success. The secret is to cut the meat into small little pieces. When browning hamburger meat, you'll need these 2 things:

Pampered Chef's Mix n' Chop

Pampred Chef's Large Micro Cooker

The mix in chop helps you get the meat into little tiny pieces. It really doesn't have be used with the micro cooker, but the micro cooker allows you to brown your meat in the microwave (sounds gross, but I promise it tastes exactly like it's been done on the stove) which is great because I hate the smell and sight of cooking meat.

For chicken recipes I use 1 chicken breast cut into about 1/2 cubes or 1/4 inch strips, depending on what I'm making.

Of course, this won't work for everything. If you're making steak or chicken to be served as whole pieces of steak or chicken, then you'll need the whole thing. For this, I give Jeff a whole breast or steak and Lucy and I share 1.

I hope this little secret helps you save some dough. Happy cooking!

Pruitt Preschool

As I've mentioned, Lucy is not attending a preschool program this year so she and I are doing preschool together. She loved her class last year and still talks about all of her friends so I'm hoping she will enjoy preschool with Mommy just as much. Her favorite part was her friends and I can't provide that but I have lots of play dates already in the works with lots of different friends so hopefully she'll have plenty of social time.

We are doing preschool on Tues. and Thurs. mornings and using the rest of the week for field trips, play dates, and unfortunately regular household chores. (Contrary to popular belief, stay at home moms actually have lots of work to do... Who knew???)

I'm a little on the OCD side and I need a fairly strict schedule to stick with or I'll put things off until they never get done. I used a sample preschool schedule as a guide for our schedule, changing the activities to fit what I want to do. Here's our schedule:

9am: Morning Meeting

9:30: Art

10: Snack

10:30: Table work

10:45 Playtime

11:15: Music

11:30: Bible story

11:45: Review/Reading

Here is a {very} detailed look at what we will do:

Morning Meeting:

During morning meeting, we'll be using our Morning Meeting board:

• Knock Knock song (This is a song we learned at story time at the library forever ago that Lucy loves. I tried to find it on You Tube but I can't so maybe the librarians made it up??? Maybe one day I'll video Lucy singing it. )
• Greetings (What can I say? I'm an SLP and it's never too early to work on appropriate social greetings.)
• Days of the Week song
• Days section of morning meeting board
• Months of the Year song
• Calendar section of morning meeting board
• Color of the day (Lucy chooses a color from a pile and sticks it to the morning meeting board. I point out some things this color, we talk about other things that are that color then I set a timer for 2 minutes and we go on a color hunt for things around the house that are that color. Throughout the day, I point out things that are the color of the day.)

• Letter of the week (There is a letter of the week curriculum that I know nothing about other than you focus on a different letter each week. All of our activities for the week will revolve around this letter. During this time, I introduce the letter, we talk about the sound it makes and read a book filled with this letter. Ex. A is for Apple so we will read 10 Apples Up on Top by Dr. Seuss.)
• Bible verse of the week (Ideally this will be a verse related to our letter theme, but sometimes that just won't be possible (I don't think there are D- donuts or dentists in the Bible) so I'll have to stretch it for some of these.)
• Weather (I printed this chart for us to fill in each day. We will then use our weather report to dress Lucy. I took the idea of "Weather Bear" and made a "Weather Lucy" by taking a picture of Lucy in her undies (I felt kind of creepy about this) and printed it in an 8x10, cut it out, and laminated it. Then I "shopped" for clothes for each season online and printed and laminated those. She'll check her "weather report" and dress her picture each day. It's never too early to learn how to dress appropriately for the seasons, right??? She's wearing her Fall dress in the picture below. I'm currently on the hunt for a picture of a great pair of boots.)
• The idea of the morning meeting is to introduce our theme and some basics that I want her to know. You would be surprised how many children don't know how to read a calendar or understand basic time concepts. My child won't be 1 of them!
• Originally I wanted a very small calendar so we could talk about the days of the week and learn the months so I started with this:

Obviously the words are too small and there is so much going on with the scrapbook paper you can't read anything. It just didn't turn out like I expected so I did a little research and came up with my Morning Meeting board. I really would have preferred it to be smaller but I kept thinking of skills I wanted to work on each day and didn't really want a million smaller boards to carry around if we do preschool on the go so I made 1 big one. All of the pieces are velcroed to the board so Lucy can easily stick things on when it's time. (She loves this part!) I keep all of the extra pieces in laminated envelopes on the back so everything is with me when I need it.

Art

Last year in preschool, Lucy "illustrated" her own Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? book by painting the colors of the book. I stole this idea and decided to have her create her own ABC book. Each week, she'll decorate a letter according to the theme. For example, for A week, she'll stamp A's with apples cut in half and covered in paint. This activity will account for 1 art activity for the week. The 2nd art activity will be theme related. For example, for B week, she is going to make a bird feeder by covering a pine cone with peanut butter and rolling it in bird seed.

Snack

Snack will also be theme related. For C week, we are talking about cookies and candy so she'll get to eat cookies for snack. (Any recipes for healthy cookies are welcome!!!)

Table Work

You'll notice that table work is only 15 minutes long. Preschoolers learn best through play and hands on activities so that will be the majority of our time but I do want to target specific skills each week so we will have some theme related but fun table work. For example, for B week, one of Lucy's field trips is going to Teddy Mountain to build a bear. She will use this bear during the next day's table work time to follow directions and locate body parts while putting bandaids where I tell her. (i.e. "Put the bandaid on Teddy Bear's ankle.") See, fun and educational all in 1!

1 "work" activity we will do each week is a letter hunt. I will hide our target letter around a room, on various themed toys, or in plastic eggs for Lucy to find. At first I'll hide all of 1 letter to help her learn to recognize individual letters. As she becomes more proficient at recognizing letters, I'll start hiding various letters, some for that week, some not so she learns to discriminate between several letters.

For help with skills to target I am using The Core Knowledge Sequence. Last year I was able to download the preschool goals in this sequence, but now I can't find them. This link is the closest I can find. I will also be using this book.

Play Time

Sometimes I will select a variety of theme related toys for Lucy to play with during this time (Ex. F is for food so we may have a pretend picnic) but most times I'll let her decide and follow her lead.

Music

1 of my fabulous practicum therapist created a song folder for 1 of our therapy programs and gave each student clinician a copy. It's basically pictures representing various kids songs (Wheels on the bus, London Bridge, Itsy Bitsy Spider, etc.) printed, laminated, and velcroed to a laminated file folder. Lucy picks a song, we sing it, then repeat with another song. She also likes to go on You Tube and sing songs/watch videos of kids songs. We'll also use her instruments to make our own music.

Bible Story

Since is it my job as Lucy's mom to "repeat (God's commands) again and again to (Lucy); talking about them when we are at home, and when we are going to bed and getting up," we will be reviewing Lucy Bible stories from church during preschool. Each Monday, our fabulous Kidz Creek leaders post that weeks Bible story/scripture reference on the church's blog and gives ideas for connecting church and home. I will re-read the story, talk about it, review the memory verse, and pray with Lucy during this time. I may have a coloring page for her to work on while I read if I feel the story is a little long for her attention span, but she enjoys these stories so it may not be necessary. (Just to brag a bit... last month she learned about Jonah and the whale. On Saturday, she told me the story of Jonah and said she wanted to tell her friends at dance. Yesterday she learned about David and told me that he was a shepherd and God helped him fight people. Yep, that's my 2 year old!!!)

Review/Read Books

During this time we'll review our letter of the day, verse of the day, and talk about what she liked and didn't like about preschool that day. This will help me plan future lessons. Lucy loves to "read" so she will have some time to read our themed books from the library while I make lunch.

I will {try} to post our preschool fun each Friday. Of course, this is just the preschool overview post and this week we will be beginning "C week" so I'm not off to the best start. That's the great thing about being your child's teacher; you can be a slacker and there's no one to complain about it! Happy learning!!!