Preschool Homeschool: Letters D and E

We just wrapped up another week of Homeschool Preschool! Here is what we did for Letter D and E!

Books

John had some strong opinions about the books on these letter's book lists! Note that I do this by just going through my little local branch's selection. Out of the 15-ish books on each list, I can normally find about 5. I then go through the children's science section and pick out whatever looks good that starts with the week's letter.

Letter D

John LOVED Angus and the Ducks. Marjorie Flack is not an author I grew up with, but I'm a new fan! This is vintage children's lit and it's awesome.

Make Way for Ducklings is another classic. We have seen the duck statues while visiting Boston a few years ago, but I had still never read the book. 

John basically loved any book in which I made lots and lots of animal sounds.

Letter E

I had honestly not expanded my Margaret Wise Brown horizons very much before embarking on this preschool endeavour. I am a fan! The Golden Egg Book has some beautiful illustrations and it's just a sweet story. 

I've learned that Margaret Wise Brown also has a sad life story. She died on Halloween 1952 after a routine surgery for the removal of her appendix and an ovarian cyst. She was doing a mock can-can kick to show the hospital staff how well she felt when she dislodged an embolism in her leg that traveled to her brain.

 Her will had been updated the day she entered the hospital to include a codicil that left most of her future royalties to an 8 year old boy who lived in a tenement apartment near her New York studio.

There was more to her than Goodnight Moon!

Adventures!

We found lots and lots of dirt and excavators! 

We visited the dinosaurs on the UC Berkeley campus again and found the mother load of crawdads in the creek, John was extremely excited about this development after being a little obsessed with crustaceans of all types from C week, Unfortunately, I couldn't get a good picture, but believe me, there were so. many. crawdads! 

John wanted to dress up as an Engineer. The best I could do was this railroad engineer costume from two Halloweens ago. 

Therese apparently wanted her own apple.

We stopped at Cafe Strada in hopes of getting an eggnog latte (clearly for me, and clearly wishful thinking in September.) It was worth it just to make the new college students a bit uncomfortable in the vicinity of small children. Therese decided she wanted to join the guy at the table next to us. When that didn't work out, she contented herself with standing on the bench and smiling and waving to everyone behind us. 

I view this as my contribution to their human education!

F is for Field Trip!

For F week, we are going on a field trip! It's our first family vacation (I'm defining that as a trip that isn't for the primary purpose of visiting relatives.) 

We're going to Yosemite National Park!

Here are the F things I'm putting on the scavenger hunt list for John:

• fossils
• flowers
• fawns
• fire (hopefully in a fireplace and not in the forest. Pretty please!)
• flying
• forest
• white fir tree
• frost (it could happen)
• ferns

Thus, I'll be out for the second half of this week, but prepare for pictures of cute kids in gorgeous surroundings!