Preschool at Home – an update

I can’t remember how much I’ve written about getting started with preschool at home, so forgive me if I’m repeating myself. 😉 I wrote a “curriculum” to cover September-May over a year ago, and then over the summer I wrote a couple of additional units since I felt like Jonas was ready to start doing a few activities and it would be nice to start out slow. We started in July & August, but probably only did 10 days out of each month. I had planned to do a full-on start in September, but visiting Nashville and then the long trip to my parents’ meant we skipped a LOT of days.

So, October has really been the kickoff! 🙂 We’re going to have a Bible theme each month (“God Wants Us to Pray”) with a story each week (this week is King Solomon, we’ll also do Hannah & Samuel, Daniel in the Lion’s Den, and Jesus’ Baptism this month). A skills focus – this month is the color orange & shape: circle. Then math readiness skills (counting 1-10), science/health (autumn), music with a nursery rhyme and a song (Little Miss Muffet & Itsy Bitsy Spider). I wore myself OUT a couple of weeks ago getting everything ready – I broke my skills ideas down week by week, so that I’d have a written outline for what to work on each week so that it’s “covered” by the end of the month.

We’re not doing every subject, every day — it’s only about 20-30 minutes a day, and on days that we have playgroup or grocery shopping or something else that keeps us busy, we likely won’t do it. I’m shooting for 2-3 times a week.

The first day we did a lot – I have set up the side of our refridgerator that faces the dining room as a “board” of sorts. There’s a label for the month, a big orange circle with “orange” and “circle” labels, our Nursery Rhyme is printed out rebus-style, and a label with our Bible theme. So we had to talk about all those things, and then we did a couple of activities as well – sorting capital and lowercase A’s.

The next day we sang our “time for preschool” song, talked about circles again (I have a little fingerplay), circled all the A’s in the nursery rhyme, and read the story of King Solomon.

On Wednesday of our first week,  we read the Bible story and made the little craft I have (it’s a “paper doll” cutout of a little boy, with a “king” costume – so we’ll act out how Solomon was just an average guy until he prayed for wisdom and God made him the Wisest King.  VERY simplistic version of the story. 😀 ). We also did a tactile thing with A – writing A/a in shaving cream. And of course, we did our song & nursery rhyme again…

Anyway, so preschool is going really well so far. I had a lot of fun prepping my stuff for the month, and almost felt like the old days of getting ready for a classroom! 🙂 Jonas seems to really enjoy it, and he has been able to tell Chris and my mom about what he learned when they asked him later (he told my mom on the phone the other day, “I do circles, and…. Muffet!” It was cute.)

Here’s a slideshow of pictures of preschool activities – I could *not* get Photobucket to cooperate (well, it’s probably more of a WordPress issue. Any ideas how I can get around that?) but you can click through to see it:

http://s2.photobucket.com/albums/y11/cmnebel/?action=view&current=cf0171a3.pbw&t=1223935575

This week, we’ll be starting the letter “B” and our story will be “Hannah Prays for a Baby”. Ironically enough, Jonas was stung by a bee today at the park. When we got home, I told him we’d have preschool when he got up from his nap and we were going to do “B” – and he freaked out for a few minutes until I used sign language to emphasize that we would be talking about the letter b, not the insect bee. 🙂