When the quads and big brother Jacob are at our house we try to give them a little "teaching" as well as playing.  We'll count tools hanging on pegboard in the garage or we'll point out colors on various things to teach as well as to reinforce their learning skills.  Awhile back I made color cards for them -- divided a sheet of colored cardstock into fourths, made color name tags to put on each one, then coated them with clear adhesive.  I had a big stack of cards and used them once -- everybody wanted to keep their "whole bunch" and wouldn't give them up.  So after they all left at the end of the day I gathered what I could and we now use them when we can get the kids one on one instead of the whole group.

We then decided to try copying pictures of apples or frogs, etc and let them sit at their little kids' card tables to color.  Each time we go through the same thing -- they all want a "whole bunch" of crayons - doesn't matter if they're the same colors or different colors, just so they have a hand full.   Sometimes they'll color, sometimes they'll pick the papers off the crayons, sometimes they decide to break the crayon, then want new ones because the one they have is broken.   Remember we're talking about 4 little 2 1/2 year olds --- big brother Jacob listens a little better.

The one thing we can do pretty well is play with play dough -- they've each picked out a certain color and boy oh boy - NOBODY better touch a color that belongs to somebody else!!  We make little balls, roads to drive little cars on, biscuits and even big thick ham sandwiches with pretend ham, lettuce, tomatoes, pickles, etc on them.  They can get very creative with the play dough!!

Well, we've decided that we would really like to extend the "pre-school" to doing just a little more than making biscuits and roads with playdough, so we bought some of the "green" bags from Office Depot -- decorated them a little -- so now we'll have one for each of them.



Jacob was here this weekend, so he helped decorate his with the tiger and all the tractors, then we made heart designs for the girls and golf tees and footballs for the little boys.  Papaw is going to write their names in the centers so they'll learn to recognize their names.

We bought little "write on - wipe off" pre-writing and alphabet books for each of them and a set of wipe off markers for each of them.  So here's the way this is going to work ---- each bag will contain one of the books, one of the markers (all five kiddies will have the SAME color and the SAME book), and I've even gotten the cheapo washcloths so that each one will have their own cloth to wipe the book pages with.  Everybody's bag will be identical, so I KNOW there will be no squawking about wanting what somebody else has, and everybody will have a great time with their new personalized bags!  Each time we do the pre-school I'll have a different color in the bag, and perhaps even a different color washcloth to wipe pages with, and we do have two books to alternate with, so it will be different each time.  

Well, I'll let you know in a few days how our new pre-school method works out.  Keep your fingers crossed for us!!