Teacher’s Pets

I’m not a teacher.  I don’t have the patience or wisdom of an educator, and I find it difficult to explain concepts verbally.  So my hat really goes off to anyone who can stand in front of a classroom and instruct a bunch of wiggly kids how to add, subtract or understand the life cycle of a butterfly.  I can barely get my two wiggly girls to look in the same direction at once!  That said, I really enjoy playing “school” with them and watching their nascent skills develop.  Just a year ago, the girls couldn’t properly manipulate a pair of scissors to save their lives; now, they happily snip-snip away like they’ve been doing it forever.  For quite a while now, the girls have recognized all their numbers and upper case letters, and they’re getting close to knowing the lower case alphabet.  The program director at their just-ended mini-preschool said that they need to work on spelling their names and learning sight words, so those are our next objectives.  To that end, I splurged on a laminating machine (okay, I probably just really wanted one so I could make regular old pieces of paper super slick and shiny, but this gave me a more legitimate excuse).  I’ve been letting the girls use dry-erase markers to trace different images I’ve laminated.  They think it’s all fun and games, and I’ve already seen an improvement in their penmanship.  They still have trouble forming letters without a guide to trace, but I’m excited to watch them get better and better.     

(Forgive my weird editing job in the above picture as I was trying to obscure the girls’ last name!).