A short Family Week

This week in homeschool preschool, the theme was Family, and it was not very successful. I thought it would be a nice easy theme, and appropriate too, since at the end of the week (i.e., tomorrow) we are planning to go visit some of our extended family. But I'm beginning to see that these themes work better if there's an exciting hook to them -- either the theme is something the boos want to learn more about or there's some really concrete way for them to relate to it. "Family" was too abstract, I think. Also, it might work better in a classroom, AWAY from one's family. Maybe it's hard to think about family when you're surrounded by it.

Still, we did a few fun things. Here are the dolls we played with on Tuesday, with the furniture sorted into outdoor and indoor stuff (and indoor stuff sorted by room). We talked about who can be in a human family (I argued in favor of tortoises, but boos were skeptical):

 Here are the gingerbread family cookies we made on Wednesday:

 And here we are playing with playdough today (Thursday):

You can see my valiant attempt at making a playdough "family" on the left. Boos were mildly interested, but did not want to try to make families of their own. However, they enjoyed the playdough and didn't want to stop when I said school was over. Also, I got them to do a short worksheet first by promising playdough as a reward (will have to remember that one).

I meant to take one more photo but forgot -- and can't right now, because my camera's battery is charging. I'll try to add it later. Anyway, that would be a photo of the family tree we started to make, using the trunk from last week's apple tree, and adding leaves with family photos on them. All I managed to get onto the tree was four leaves representing our little family. I wanted to at least add the boos' aunts and uncles and grandparents, but immediately we run into trouble. One aunt and all the grandparents are gone from this world. I thought of putting their pictures on orange and yellow leaves instead of green, but I don't know.

Then there's their uncle, who's been causing us a lot of grief -- I won't go into the details, but suffice it to say that we learned this week that most of the money we've given him over the last 10 years was unnecessary. So I wasn't in the mood to make a leaf for him.

I wanted to put enough leaves on the tree to reach the extended family that we're going to visit this weekend. Even if it didn't make any sense to boos, it would have been nice to look at. But that's a lot of leaves! It would take a lot of leaves to get to Rocket Boy's relatives in Germany, too, though I'd really like to get them on there.

Well, next week's theme is -- can you guess? -- LEAVES! So I have some more time to think about this.