P.A.T Chritmas Party

For Emily's preschool this year (while she's still a little young to enroll in an actual school) I've been teaching her myself. Every day we try to have atleast an hour where we work on colors, counting, and letters. Then we either build with blocks, do play dough, color or sometimes we'll go to the craft store and pick out a project. Every week we go to Story Time at the library and enjoy good books, songs and do the fun art projects they have too. We also participate in the PAT ( parents as teachers) program which is amazing! Once a month they have an open house where they have art projects, games, stories, sing a longs and the kids get to pick a book to keep. They also have book bags and project bags that you can check out that are full of fun books and projects that go along with them. Emily and I have also signed up for home visits, so Emily's teacher Nicole comes once a month and works with Emily one on one and she brings even more books and projects for us to do. She also brings hand outs for me with ideas for teaching her myself and information about development for Emily and Camden both (they're both enrolled in the program). Best part...it's free! I just hope the funding continues for this amazing program because we love it!

This month the open house was a Christmas party. We went with Emily's good friend Madi. She is my second counselor, Diana's granddaughter. Diana and I have become great friends and I'm so glad the girls have too! We made little Christmas trees, decorated Santa graham crackers, sewed jingle bell bracelets, read Christmas stories, sang Christmas songs and Emily's favorite part...Santa and Mrs. Claus came!!

While the kids were up front singing Jingle Bells Santa snuck in behind them. Emily was so excited when he came right up to her. She felt so special I'm sure!