First off here’s a little disclaimer. We haven’t necessarily talked about whether or not to homeschool “for real”—haven’t really even broached the subject except for here and there and then we realize that we have at least 2 years before E even has to start going to school and we push the subject off. Part of me wants to homeschool—it’s what I know, it’s comfortable, but we have to decide if that’s going to be best for us as a family. For now we’re playing with it. Preschool . . . why? Because E asks all the time to “go to school” or to “do school” and has shown a crazy interest in reading and her mom is the biggest nerd around. So we’re diving in because she’s 3 and I’m not sending my 3 year old to school (can’t do it. I’d cry everyday). With that being said . . .
I’ve gotten a lot of questions about how I’m doing preschool. What curriculum am I going with? How in the world do I have time to teach E preschool? Well, I’ll let you in on all my secrets in the next couple of posts . . .
Number one: Which curriculum am I going with?
Well, I’m not. I played with getting Sonlight or Before Five in a Row (big literature based . . .imagine that), but then this is Preschool. It’s like “play school”. It’s like we do school how ever many days we want and we don’t have to worry about the state breathing down our next with XX many hoops that we have to jump through. Yada yada. So I decided against spending actual money on something that was going to tell me to read this book and then do this activity. Instead? I jumped on Pinterest and started thinking and planning.
First I made a rough list of what I want E to learn this year (ok, I Facebooked my sister-in-law who is a kindergarden teacher and asked her what skills/stuff she needed to know going into kindergarden). ABC, Math, and Lapbooks—and this my friends will teach her all the skills she’ll need going into Kindergarden.
ABCs
I know one of our goals is to start to learn to read (my kid loves books). Yes, I know she’s only 3 (she’ll be 4 in November), but she’s showing interest and I was reading at 4 that’s my justification. Starting off I’m going to make sure she knows her letters (bigs and smalls) and then we’ll jump into phonics and reading—I’m thinking that’s a good couch project so we’ll probably start more on this at the start of the New Year when all I want to do is sit on the couch (haha). My mom and I (mostly my mom) have concocted various matching games that will help with letter recognition.
Math
I have to take it easy with this subject because I loathe math. I really do. I like preschool math which consists of lots of counting games, writing our numbers, and number recognition. Easy peasy I got this.
Lapbooks
I got some of you scratching your head on this one. All I’m going to say is these things are crazy fun. I’ve got most of my lapbooks from here. I literally have made my year lesson plans around these. Some are based off of books some just subjects, but inside there’s everything from games, coloring, cutting, pasting, ABCs, numbers, and the list goes on. And get this—most of them are completely free!! All you have to do is print them and insert into a manilla folder! Seriously. Elsie sees me working on these and she gets so so excited.
Ok. So that was all about curriculum. I’ll be back later this week to talk about lesson planning and how I fit everything into the day!
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