tonyandkirsten.org

Having ditched the first curriculum we started, I now had to decide how we should spend our time. Since it was early to mid October when we decided to take a different path, a logical next stop on our journey seemed to be focusing on seasonal and holiday topics like fall, Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas.

We really haven’t been doing anything too fancy with our preschool time — I’ve been finding books at the library most weeks related in some way to one of the timely topics, and we find some time each week to do some related crafts. I unfortunately feel like I have been slighting Christmas. Between the expected activities that take up time during the Christmas season (baking cookies, shopping for gifts, holiday parties, etc) and the unexpected events in our life (like two hours spent waiting for a tow truck after the car died while we were en route to the library or Madeline getting sick or friends dropping in), we’ve barely cracked open the door to the craft cabinet, much less me spending time picking out crafts directly related to Christmas. I guess we have a few more days to do something about that.

My goal has been to have more of a plan to go with after the first of the year. I do have one piece of that plan — a book called “Teaching a Young Child to Read“. This book is divided into 27 “kits” or segments with ideas to take a child from simple letter recognition to basic phonics and all the way through some fairly complex reading comprehension. I checked out several “how to” books from the library on teaching reading, and this one was my favorite. It uses methods that seem sensible and easy to implement.

I also decided I’d like to experiment with some kind of a literature-based curriculum to see how this works for us. The books “Before Five in A Row” and “Five in a Row” are somewhat-popular options that take this approach. The idea with these curricula is to read the same book for five days in a row, and base a variety of activities from all subject areas around the themes of the book. I checked these books out from the library to evaluate them, but I wasn’t convinced that they were the right fit for us. I found a similar book called “Peak with Books” that I now have checked out from the library. It looks promising. “Peak with Books” covers fewer subject areas than the “five in a row” books, but it’s activities appear to be more creative extensions of the books it covers. I think we might like the books suggested in “Peak with Books” better as well.

I really can’t say right now if these approaches are really going to work for us. But I am looking forward to trying a new plan…maybe by the fall of 2008 we’ll be on to something completely different!

Of course no matter what approaches or curricula we use , I’m sure we’ll still be doing lots of crafts and seasonal activities, and some math and science related stuff here and there in addition to our reading and literature fare.

Two other new developments in our preschool journey are Madeline’s newly-found love for complex, in-depth pretending, and the home preschool co-op we started attending about once a week this fall…but I’ll save those for another post!

We’re only a little over three months in, but I’m finding that my approach doing preschool at home with Madeline has already changed from our initial plan.   After thinking and planning for over a year, I had chosen a preschool curriculum that I thought was perfect for us — available free on the web, Christian-based, and a good mix of “traditional” preschool activities with fun games and language learning techniques that match up with what some of the latest research says is the best way for kids to learn to read.

When theory met reality, the results were not what I had hoped for.  The curriculum did have tons of fun educational games to play…but they took a lot of time to prepare.  Cutting and pasting is not something I have an abundance of time for, especially as Erik gets more and more active and curious.  Even when I did finish my prep work for Madeline to play some of the games, sometimes her attention span for the game was less than the time it took to prepare it.  This didn’t really strike me as the best use of my time.

After a particularly frustrating week where Madeline starting telling me she didn’t like home preschool anymore, I decided this curriculum had to go.  The nice thing about home preschool (in comparison to “real” homeschooling)  is that there is nothing you “have” to do.  Kids at this age learn a lot just through play and listening to stories and parents taking advantage of little lessons that are a part of everyday life.  One of the main reasons I started a curriculum in the first place was I thought Madeline wanted or needed more structure.  She seemed to want to learn more and was looking for new ways to do it.

Tony and I decided we  had three simple goals for our “home preschooling” with Madeline at this time:

1. She would be learning about God and His character and how He worked through history in various Bible stories

2.  She would be progressing toward learning to read.  (We know she doesn’t need to learn to read now, as a three-year-old, but she is very interested in letters and letter sounds, so we want to take advantage of this interest. )

3. She would be learning perseverance — sticking with a task even when she doesn’t like it.  Obviously she will be growing in this character area for years to come, but we thought that it would be good for her upcoming years of schooling if she could learn to sit through a story with a positive attitude even if it isn’t one she selected, or finish a game or activity that she is less than interested in.  The first curriculum we tried I think required too much of her in this area– there were just too many things that didn’t interest her and it made her want to give up.

I think this post will quickly turn into a novel if I share everything I’ve been wanting to share about this, so I’ll make this into a series.   Look for the next installment coming soon…hopefully you won’t have to wait two months for it (I can’t believe I went almost that long between my last post and this one!).