This Breakfast Brought to You By...

...the letter P!

noshing on pancakes and peaches

Cora and I started school the other week.  It went okay.  Actually, I was pleasantly surprised at how much she retained from the one day that we had 'formal' schooling.  But, something was nagging at me about the whole situation.  I just felt like the formal process that I was trying to routinize was not terribly developmentally appropriate for a three year old.  I mean, that was one of the reasons that I really became disillusioned and disappointed with the public school system.  For fear of the big, bad TAKS, most of the developmentally appropriate practices (free choice centers, recess - yes, recess is necessary! - hands-on exploration, unit study, etc.) had to be pushed to the side in order to drill and kill the objectives on the test.  As I mentioned in my previous homeschooling post, a big part of this process is going to include the retraining of me.  Needless to say, at this point, we are taking a more laid-back, organic approach to learning.  What does that mean, you ask?  Well, basically, I'm just capitalizing on those little teachable moments as they occur throughout the day.

Folks, brace yourself for another embarrassing parenting confession.  Some days, Cora gets to watch more than her fair share of television. (gasp!)  Quite honestly, if Carys has had a rough night, television is a bit of a survival strategy for this mamacita.  (God bless PBS Kids!)  After an episode of Word World, Cora has suddenly become very interested in letter sounds.  And, as the teachable moments come up, we explore them.  So, today when the auspicious circumstances came up, we learned all about the letter P.  It turns out that Cora requested fresh peaches with her pancake breakfast.  We discovered the same sound at the beginning of both words.  We also discovered that Penny begins with that same sound, but that water does not.  Thus far, we have learned the letter sounds for b, c, h, m, p, and s.  


Not surprisingly, we are also studying dinosaurs.  At the library this morning, we found several age appropriate nonfiction books about them. But, I think, at least when it comes to giant reptiles, Cora may be teaching me!  Cora was deeply engrossed in a dino ABC book when she came to the letter J (for Jurassic).  Witness the conversation that took place:

Cora: What's this page?
Me:  That's J for Jurassic.  Oh look!  It's T Rex. (I pointed to one of the three unnamed dinosaurs on the page)
Cora: That's not T Rex.  That's Allosaurus.

Folks, I know better than to argue.  Sure enough, when I researched it later (Yes, I had to research it.  Yes, Cora generally knows more about this stuff than me.), Allosaurus is from the Jurassic. T Rex is from the Cretaceous.  sigh  As if the thought of homeschooling wasn't daunting enough!  Looks like I'm going to be learning right along side the little paleontologist!