Work Sheets?

Coming up with non-worksheet ideas for learning is easy at this age, however I imagine it will become harder as Holly grows up. That being said, there is still a LOT of worksheet like 'work' that is included in Kindergarten curriculum. She loves them, me not so much for this age. We do some of course as it is necessary, but I try to find different ways to do some learning as well. I read books, scour the Internet and make mental notes of things I find while out and about in life. In fact, I find my mind is on school mode about 98% of the time... is this normal?

Anyhow, we have been talking environments moving onto habitats... which has tied in some basic mapping skills. She loves maps, always has! I have collected some over time that include our various zoos, parks, and towns that we have compared to greater scale maps we keep in the car. After some looking and play with them she created her own map of her room - which turned out amazing! Then we took her car mat and I had her create buildings from blocks to create a map she could play with. She had a GREAT time doing this! She named all of her buildings, and we practiced finding places with her cars.

When it comes to learning/practicing her vocabulary words, sight words and math it is fun to try and incorporate other ideas outside of worksheets... which is really hard as this is primarily worksheet based learning. For instance we have played several games over the past few days to cover math skills, practice counting, greater than and less then, etc. Believe it or not, we used Legos to tie in some high counting practice. And, we did some fun word games as well!

We are now moving more into animal habitats... this will be so much fun for Holly!!! The library had a ton of information for us, it was hard to narrow down our choices. Holly had fun choosing which series of books we would use and she worked with the librarian in finding these items, a skill in itself. We also chose some great videos to go along with our books - they are really good too! And, we have an amazing art book based on animal habitats that came with our curriculum - so we will be doing a lot of fun art projects along the way.