Julianne's birthday is November 1st so she doesn't meet the cutoff date for school. This means that she gets held back and year and is required to do transitional kindergarten before entering Kindergarten. Because of the extra year of school, Jason and I decided to skip preschool all together. Although she was skipping preschool, I was determined to teach her as much as I could before she started TK. We have been working on our colors, simple letters, some addition and of course on spelling and recognizing her name. I was always online on Pinterest looking up ideas and sometimes found myself getting stuck on exactly how to explain, move forward, and make our learning extra fun. 
If you follow me on Instagram then you may have seen us using some shape cards on our stories. A few months ago we came across the Kindergarten toolkit, on Instagram and we love it! I am able to get lots of special time, not only with Jules but with Kourtney as well. She is eager to learn and keep up with her big sister. I've seen so much growth within both girls. Kourtney is 17 months and knows how to count to 4 and knows her colors purple and blue. I try my best to do "school", as Jules calls it, at least once a day. It doesn't always go as planned and she sometimes gets frustrated with me, which is always my hint to stop, but for most of the time we get a good solid 3-4 days of learning in. When she first started she would get extremely frustrated because she wanted to follow along and do all the writing parts, like her name and the certain letters we were learning that week. Her pen control is something that she has really excelled in the last couple of weeks and it makes me so happy to see her so prod of herself.
I try my best to keep our schedule super simple. We do a color and a letter each week. This week was the letter "U", we are currently on the u in Julianne, and the color is pink. Before we start each week Jules goes around the house and looks for items in the the color we are doing and places them on the table. Kourtney always starts off with our dot markers in the color of the week and taps away on some paper while Jules works on tracing the letter of the week. Jules of course, wants her turn with the markers too so they switch off at some point. We always end each day with going over our colors and shapes cards, Jules knows all of them like hexagon and pentagon, then she traces her name three times. This routine seems to keep the girls excited so we've stuck to it for the past couple of months.
I have my bachelors in art, and worked at an after school program teaching it and working closely with kids and their school work for over 9 years. I would say that background really helped me get creative with my girls. I was able to bring lots of the fun things I did with those kids into my own home to get my girls eager and excited to get their creativeness on. But, I am in no way a "teacher" so teaching letters, numbers and sight words was something I needed a little help with. This Kit has been super helpful and makes this mommy thing a little easier. I especially love that it was not only designed by a teacher but by a mommy herself that had the same exact goal for her kids that all us mommies do! To read more about the Kindergarten Toolkit and see what is included, click here.
p i n m e :
We've teamed up with the Kindergarten Toolkit to bring my readers a special code. Use: thanks10 for $10 off your purchase.
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