Over Christmas break I declared to my youngest, almost four year old daughter, that we were going to begin preschool lessons with her when school started back. You should have seen the twinkle in her eyes when I announced this to her. It was sweet and is the fuel that keeps me focused on including her in school lessons much more than I have in the past.

We started the year off with a literature study on Curious George Makes Pancakes by Margret and H. A. Rey...a very fitting book for this little girl. Tee-Hee.

• Cooking - We started this fun week off with making Monkey Bread. While Tom's mom was up during Christmas she made this and left the recipe...it's now a family favorite. It's extremely simple to make...simple enough that my little monkey helped make it. I'll add the recipe for Easy Monkey Bread at the end of this post.

I'll be the first to admit that this particular Monkey Bread didn't come out pretty...I left it to cool in the bundt pan too long and the sugar hardened gluing the bread to the pan. Lesson learned. Anyways, nonetheless, we absolutely enjoyed eating Monkey Bread and bananas for breakfast. And Claira was so thrilled and proud to have been a part of it all.

• Yellow - We focused on the color yellow with the foods we ate, clothes we wore, books we read, etc.

Tuesday

• Reading - Read monkey books since this is our library day.

Wednesday

• Smelling - We talked about smelling since this is the way Curious George found the delicious smelling pancakes. I blindfolded Claira and let her sniff four different things I found around our kitchen. Her challenge was to guess what she was sniffing. It was a lot of fun and I was rather impressed that she knew when she was sniffing cinnamon.
• Trying new foods - We talked about trying new foods. This was a brief discussion with her since she isn't fond of foods that don't look appealing to her. She's definitely the picky eater. But I did encourage her in trying new foods and will have this story to fall back on when encouraging her to try something new.

Thursday

• Saving money for a worthy cause - In the story, the pancake breakfast is a fund raiser for the children's hospital. I thought this would be an excellent opportunity to encourage giving financially to a worthy cause. Even the youngest can participate in this kind of giving. So we made a money canister and are collecting money to help send a friend to Haiti on a mission trip. But the fun doesn't stop there...We also decided that each time this month that we eat either pancakes or waffles that everyone will have to put a donation into our "Sending Miss Kari to Haiti" canister...just like in the story! (Guess what we had for breakfast on Friday. I made a trip to Sam's this afternoon and bought the mega-sized bag of pancake mix.)

TJ and Claira making the money canister.

• Make pancakes - Grace and Della helped out with getting our pancake fund raiser together. We enjoyed a delicious smelling and tasting breakfast of pancakes, sausage links, blackberries, and OJ. As for the money canister, we agreed not to  count the money at all until February 1st. Although it may seem like it's only little that is being collected, I told the kids this is a perfect opportunity to allow God to work His wonders. I am expecting to be pleasantly surprised at the amount of money that we collect little by little. There are so many great lessons hidden in this for us all.