Our Preschool Journey: Learning what doesn’t work, setting our goals
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!).