first day of preschool!

One of my New Year's Resolutions is to get a little more structure and routine in our lives. My two-year-old is a very high energy, strong-willed kid, and the chaos of the last several months has made life... difficult. With a new baby, then me busier than usual with work things, and then moving, well, routine and structure will be good for all of us.

So one of the biggest things I decided to do to implement this was to start having preschool time, with planned activities and things that we'll do each day. We already read lots of stories, and my little guy just absorbs knowledge from our everyday activities (he's constantly surprising me with the things he knows!), but I think having specific preschool time will be really beneficial.

Last week I spent lots of time digging through my Pinterest boards to find ideas for starting preschool. And I have to say a HUGE thank you and give a big shout out to my friend Katie from The Red Kitchen. Go check out the Preschool section on her blog. Seriously. It is awesome, and gave me hope that I can actually pull this off, and so many ideas on how to start this new adventure!

I started talking to Jack about preschool last week, hoping to get him excited about it. He helped me organize the drawers to keep all of his preschool stuff in - crayons, stickers, scissors, bubbles, playdough, etc. I made a "schedule" that I showed him and we talked about all the fun things we'd get to do during preschool.

 That's the schedule I made. It's likely to change a bit as we get into things and I get a feel for what works best for us. I might add music time, or I might just have that be part of our "activity" time. We'll see. It's a work in progress. But it was helpful to show it to Jack last week and prep him for it, and use it today to remind him that we had to do other things first before he could use his new scissors and paints (he was really excited about them!)

So today was our very first day of Preschool! It actually went much better than I had anticipated. We got through all of our planned activities without any tantrums, and a pretty high level of interest and cooperation from the little man.

Today's theme was "colors." He actually already knows all of his colors, but this worked out well to keep it with something he's already familiar with and enjoys - he loves telling us what color things are. 

We read a couple of stories about colors, then sorted and counted paint chips, then got out the water colors. And after he was done painting, he of course wanted to play with Thomas (he's OBSESSED with trains!) and drove Thomas all over his painting. I think it was a success!

I'm working on ideas for a whole bunch of different "themes" for preschool time, with stories and activities for each theme. Planning to post more about them soon!