Bear Tea Party

This year I am homeschooling Haley for pre-school.  Next year she will be gone all day in Kindergarden.  I really want this to be a special and memorable year for us.  I want her to find learning fun and exciting so when she does go to school she is ready.  I do have my degree in elementary education so I feel very capable in writing lesson plans.  I hope I am able to manage our time to keep going with them through out the day.  The lessons are very short, about 30 minutes to an hour.  But I can talk about what we are learning all day and every where we go.  The first week we learned the letter Ff and how to write using a pencil and write her name.  We really have to practice holding the pencil because she is just not getting it.  We are also going to really have to work on writing her own name and all the other letters.  She is excited and ready to learn though.

Here is our work from the last week and a half.  She is very proud of all she has done.

This week we are learning the letter Bb.  We have been putting lots of focus on bears because they start with the letter b and I have lots of books with bears.  On Monday we read Brown Bear, Brown Bear by Eric Carle.  I also found some great print outs to color and some bear songs to sing from  Homeschool Share.  This is a great site.  I have also been using letter print outs from another great site called Kids Learning Station.  Today we made a Bb book and went over some cards I have and asked if they made the b sound or not.   While she was working on her Bb book I made an invitation for her for a Bear Tea Party.  Once we got all of her tea party toys and food together she got really excited about the party.  She set up all the bears we had on her quilt and made sure every bear had a place to sit.  

Here is my very simple invitation. 

And the inside.  We talked about where, when and what you need for the invitation.

Haley is ready for her tea party to begin.

Here are the books for today.  We read Tea with Ruby first because this was a tea party.  Then we read the devotion, School for Bears.  Then Good Night Sam and Jesus Loves Me! I read them to her and to all the bears.  We pretended that the bears were students and some of them were being very disruptive.  It was a fun party.

When the party was over we invited Jacob to sit for a little bit.  He couldn't take his eyes off of everything.  He really liked trying all of the food and stirring the pots.  When he left he made sure he had all of his bears.