tonyandkirsten.org

I’m hoping to keep a journal of what we’re doing with our home preschooling.  It’s for our memory as much as anything else, but I also thought it would be fun to share, along with a few pictures.  This wasn’t a full month since we didn’t start until the second week in September.

Madeline loves doing preschool and begs to do it every day, even on weekends or days when we spend most of our day doing other things.  I’m very thankful she’s still enjoying it over three weeks in.  I’m still working on convincing her that things other than just very structured activities from our curriculum are still part of “preschool”.   Random art projects, playing go-fish, reading books and baking together are all important learning experiences for her…but when we fill our time with those things she keeps asking, “When are we going to do preschool, mom?”

A lot of our structured preschool activities so far have been focused around learning or reviewing various basic concepts related to language, math and general life-skills.  The first week, we worked on Madeline learning her address and phone number and how to write her name.  Quick memorization is not one of Madeline’s best skills at this point, so we are still working on remembering those things! We reviewed and practiced lots of spacial and numerical concept words like above, below, middle, many, few, left, right, and so on.  The curriculum suggested working on basic color and shape words, but since Madeline is already pretty familiar with those, we took those concepts to the next level and worked on color mixing, primary and secondary colors, and more advanced shape names like octagon, sphere and cube.  She also got her first introduction to ordinal numbers (first, second, third, etc) and fractions (learning about halves of an apple, fourths of an apple, etc).

Madeline very desperately wants to learn how to read — and how to spell/write so she can write things down for herself and not have to work through me to write down her stories and thoughts.  She asked this past week if she could sit and type at the computer like I do,  so I opened up a Word document for her and let her type away.  When she was finished and printed our her page-long masterpiece, she was very disappointed to learn that Tony and I couldn’t really “read” it to her because it was essentially three words, a few hundred characters in length each.  Heartbroken would be a good way to describe it.

So, even though she’s only four and I am not 100% convinced that she is developmentally ready, I am going to try her out on some “learning to read” activities.  I tried “Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons” very briefly with her this past summer.  I also tried just working though some “Bob” Books with her (very easy incremental readers).  Neither of those methods really seemed to click for her…though again, I don’t know how much of it is the method and how much of it is where she is at developmentally.  I’ve been researching other phonics/reading curricula and I also thought we would try some multi-media approaches.  She did a free lesson of Headsprout today and I think we might try a free trial at Reading Eggs as well.  She’s very excited about it right now, so we’ll see how it goes!

In September we did two areas of topical or unit study — Weather and Fall (we’re still working on our Fall activities).  For our study of weather, one of the big highlights was making a poster with pictures to illustrate various weather terms:

We also did a few weather-related science experiments, including learning about thermometers and temperature:

Of course, we also did plenty of random, fun things this month too.  Making “rainbow crayons” from crayon shavings and scraps was a blast:

For the next month, I’m looking forward to doing even more science/nature related activities (especially in conjuction with our continuing unit on Fall).  I also want to improve at incorporating review into our preschool time.  Whether it’s concepts that Madeline didn’t quite “get” the first time or terms we don’t use every day that she might forget about, I think we need to review more regularly.

While I’ve decided not to place a big emphasis on the Bible activities in the curriculum (we seem to have enough to talk about with our Bible story ritual at betime and the Bible stories/concepts she’s learning at church and other random occaisions), I think I want to start incorporating the character-topic lessons that are in the curriculum. I think those will provide a nice Biblical component to our preschool time without having Bible-story overkill.

I thought I would try out something new…A blog I read called “I’m an Organizing Junkie” has a weekly event called “Menu Plan Monday.”  Hundreds of bloggers post a menu on their own blogs, and then post a link to their menu back at the “org junkie” site.  It’s fun to look through some of the posts and get inspiration for future menus.  I don’t know if I’ll do this every week, but I thought I would give it a shot.

This week’s menu is greatly influence by what was on sale last week at Cub foods (lots of great specials in their 40th anniversary sale) and the random things I had around that I need to use up.  Here it goes…

Monday: Pork Roast in the crock pot ($1/lb last week at Cub!), mashed potatoes, lettuce salad

Tuesday: Salmon Patties on buns, veggie du jour ( = whatever I feel like from the frozen veggies in the freezer), and probably another side dish w/rice or pasta

Wednesday: Pizza (w/ chicken, pepperoni, and other misc. toppings) and a veggie du jour.  I make my own crust and I am still searching for the perfect recipe that is thick and chewy but not too “bready.”  This is the one I tried last time — it was okay but it make a ton of dough, and I didn’t divide it enough ways so my crust was way too thick.

Thursday: Enchiladas (a small pan each of beef and seafood…to use what I have around!) and homemade salsa-sort of stuff I make with tomatoes, avocado, onion, etc.

Friday: Chili using Tony’s awesome recipe (see below) and Cornbread. We have a few small peppers to harvest from our garden that we’ll be using for the spicy portion of the chili!

Saturday: Tomato and Spinach Pasta Toss (but mine will be with ground pork I got on sale at Cub, instead of with sausage)

Sunday: We have plans with family, so we’re not cooking dinner at home

Tony’s Chili

5 small cans tomato paste (6oz)
1 lb. ground beef, browned and seasoned with Chili Powder
4 cups water
2 cans Chili Beans (16oz)
¾ to 1 Jalapeño Pepper, chopped (add to taste)
½ a Green Pepper, chopped
1 can Diced Tomato Chunks (16oz)
½ an Onion, Chopped
Chili Powder and Cayanne Pepper to taste (needs LOTS of chili powder)

Mix all ingredients together and cook all day or at least five hours in a large crock pot (6qt). Continue to check seasoning throughout the day and add more if needed.

The energy exuded by small children is quite the wonder.  Most of us would like to get more of it for ourselves.  But of course the energy quickly disappears as soon as words like “dishes”, “laundry” or “clean up time”  are spoken.   Here’s just a small sampling of this amazing energy that I have documented:

Partially inspired by this post on one of the many home/family/parenting-related blogs in my rss reader, and partially motivated by a desire to show off the one area in my house that is organized in a way I am really proud of…I now bring to you the Arts/Crafts Cabinet:

The diagram tells most of the story, though you may have to click on it to see a version large enough to read the labels. The Art Cabinet sits in our dining room. What you can’t see are two clear plastic boxes (the kind desiged for portable file folder storage) that sit on top.  One of those boxes holds Madeline’s “cutting and pasting” supplies (she likes to cut pictures out of magazines and glue them in her special “beautiful pictures” scrapbook), and the other box contains those really random supplies you need every now and then, like cotton balls, pine cones, egg cartons, and pie tins.

We’ve been slowly collecting these art supplies for the past year and a half or so.  Sometime last summer they spilled out of the small cabinet in our built-in-buffet where they had been housed, and we bought this cabinet.  It languished in various stages of disorganization for most of the past year, but I took one whole morning late this summer (without the kids around) to really whip it into shape.  Most of the organizational supplies (baskets, boxes, etc) were purchased on clearance or at least on sale, and Tony was nice enough to add an extra shelf for me.  Madeline uses the supplies in the cabinet almost daily, so it is well worth it to me to have spent the time to organize it in such as way that she can easily find things and put them back with at least moderate success.

Though we have a fair amount of arts and crafts supplies at this point, I’ve tried to make this a fairly frugal endeavor.  Here’s a few ways I did that (keep in mind we started with just a few items, and grew our stock over a year or more):

• We put arts and crafts supplies on Christmas and Birthday lists.  Madeline has gotten a lot of really nice basic supplies this way, as well as some coloring books and so on.
• I Stocked up on basic supplies during back-to-school sales.  Crayons, glue, glue sticks, construction paper, and more are dirt cheap in August.
• I Look around for odds and ends at garage sales and thrift stores.  I was able to purchase a bag of mixed yarn scraps (perfect for kids crafts that need a few pieces of several colors) for a buck at Savers.  During the last 50% off sale at Savers, I scored two sets of kids stencils (new in package) also for a buck each.  These were in the games section.  So, look carefully — you never know what cast off treasures you may find.
• We’ve found coloring books and workbooks on clearance at Target or Walmart.
• We re-use things found around the house when ever possible — small pieces of tissue paper and wrapping paper, old greeting cards, leftover scraps of scrapbook paper, and of course things like egg cartons and paper towel tubes are are fun and free for crafting
• When I do want to purchase Madeline something I haven’t been able to get by other means, I try to make the best use possible of the “40%/50%-off-one-item” coupons for the craft stores as well as taking advantage of their other sales.

Maybe one of these days some other part of my house will be organized in a photo-worthy manner, but for right now I am still enjoying the feeling of satisfaction for having completed this project!

We went to Duluth this past weekend to celebrate our 6th anniversary…

I went to Duluth quite a few times with my family growing up, but it was Tony’s first visit.  Tony’s mom watched the kids for us so we could get away by ourselves for the weekend.  We enjoyed watching ships, looking around at the maritime museum, eating at some fun restaurants, and driving up the north shore of Lake Superior to see Split Rock Lighthouse.

Duluth is a great nearby vacation destination…we’re looking forward to going back with our kids sometime in the future.

When the topic of cloth diapers came up while I was pregnant with Madeline, I dismissed the idea almost immediately.  When I thought of cloth diapers, I thought of pins poking small babies, complicated and leaky pieces of fabric that somehow had to be wrapped around a baby, and of course, lots of smelly laundry.

The smelly laundry factor may still be true (unless you can afford a diaper service)… But in the past year I’ve learned that cloth diapers have changed a lot since our mothers or grandmothers may have used them. While it might be exaggerating slightly to say they have moved into the 21st century, innovations in style like pocket diapers and “all in one” diapers, along with closures like velcro, snaps, and “snappis” to hold the diapers in place, certainly make the idea of cloth diapering a lot more palatable.

A couple of years ago, I don’t think I knew a single person who currently used cloth diapers.  I now have a number of friends and acquaintances (both here in Minnesota and back in Iowa) who are either using cloth or are considering it. Cloth diapering is a growing trend among parents in general — between the money savings it brings during uncertain economic times, the environmental concerns presented by throwing diapers in landfills, and the health concerns that some parents have about the chemicals used to manufacture disposable diapers, more and more parents are making the switch.

So, what about us? Well, first off let me say that the soonest I would consider using cloth is when the new baby arrives.  I am super sensitive to smells while I am pregnant, and I just don’t think I could stomach rinsing off Erik’s smelly diapers, even with a nice diaper sprayer.

It’s hard to argue with the cost savings of using cloth.  We currently spend about as little as is possible to keep Erik in disposables.  We usually buy generic at Target, and our monthly cost is probably only about $25-$30 per month for both diapers and wipes.  However, that means we’ve already spent at least $450 on diapers for Erik, and we probably have at least another year left of diapering him. Once baby #3 arrives, we’ll most likely have two kids in diapers for at least 8 months (and that’s assuming Erik can be potty trained at age two-and-a-half, the same age at which we were able to start Madeline in the training process…but I’ve heard boys often train later than girls).  So, that would be a monthly cost of at least $50 over that time period.  Even with the added laundry cost, buying a decent stash of cloth diapers would definitely cost less over the long run.

I’m having a harder time being convinced about the environmental benefits in our situation.  Here in Minneapolis, our garbage does not go to a landfill — it all gets burned.  While this presents other possible environmental concerns, washing several extra loads of laundry each week causes more energy usage and water usage — which are also environmental negatives.  So, it’s a wash (pun only semi-intended) in my mind environmentally.

Then what’s left are the practical concerns.  These are more on the negative side of cloth diapering (or the positive side of continuing to use disposables).   We currently live in a tri-plex where we share one washer and one dryer with three other people besides our family.  The washer and dryer may not always be immediately available, and I would have to watch to make sure I wasn’t monopolizing the laundry facilities too much for myself.  We are planning to move out of this place around May or June of 2009, but that would mean at least four months of diaper laundry here if we go with cloth.

I’m honestly worried about the smell of the poopy diapers, even when I am not pregnant.  I am always at least a little sensitive to smells, and I fear that may still gag and feel queasy.  I worry that I might be too lazy for cloth diapering.  Now that Erik is a busy toddler, I can ignore his diaper for hours.  That wouldn’t work so well with cloth. I could avoid those problems for a while by keeping Erik in disposables until he is potty trained, while still using cloth for the new baby…but I would have to deal with it down the road anyway as baby #3 gets older.  There is also the extra work of doing more laundry at a time in life where I will have more work than ever taking care of three kids.

The question of cloth or disposables is not answered yet in my mind.  I’m glad I still have at least three months or so to think about it!

Whether you want to plan your own homeschool preschool curriculum, find a few worksheets to keep your preschooler busy or find ideas for a few fun activities to do with your child, there are many free resources on the web to meet your needs.  I’ll highlight some resources that I’ve run across…please let me know about any others you like in the comments!

Items with a * are some of my favorites that I use more often!

Worksheets, Craft Templates and other Printables:

*TLS Books and Preschool Worksheets

*DLTK’s Printable Crafts for Kids

Enchanted Learning (paid membership required to access some content)

*First School

ABC Teach for Pre-K (paid membership required to access some content)

KidZone Preschool

School Express for Ages 3-6 (paid membership required to access some content)

Early Childhood Worksheets (some free items, many more require paid membership)

Printable Worksheets at about.com

childcareland.com – Early Learning Activities For Pre-K and Kindergarten (link is to free downloads — other items available for purchase)

Author Jan Brett’s Home Page (coloring pages, worksheets, etc)

Printactivities.com (Printable Worksheets, Puzzle and Maze pages, etc)

Links Specifically for Coloring Pages

Funschool – Preschool – ABC Coloring Pages

Preschool Coloring Book : Letter Coloring Pages

ColoringBookFun.com – Free Coloring Pages – Printable Pages – Holiday Printables

The Coloring Castle

Activity Ideas

*Preschool Express by Jean Warren (some printables and lots of activities)

*Universal Preschool (typical course of study plus basic activities for each skill)

*Preschool and kindergarten learning activities. (Mostly articles, activity suggestions and links)

Preschool Activities — Bags and Boxes (Especially for keeping a toddler or preschooler busy independently)

Themes and Lesson Plans

Free Preschool themes & lesson plans

Everything Preschool Favorite Themes

The Virtual Vine

PRESCHOOL by Stormie (lesson plan ideas plus other assorted activities)

Gayle’s Preschool Rainbow – Activity Central (activities centered around various themes)

Bible Activities and Printables:

Bible Preschool Activities and Crafts

Calvary Chapel Children’s Ministry Curriculum: New Testament (there’s an Old Testament section too)

Christian Preschool Printables

Preschool Bible Coloring Pages : Children’s Bible Coloring Pages : ABC Home Preschool

DLTK Bible Crafts

While certainly not a necessity, many people would like to use some kind of curriculum to guide them in their home preschooling.  Here are links and a bit of information on some of the curricula I’ve run across. If you know of others (especially any that you have used or purchases personally), please let us know about it in the comments!

Free Curricula Available on the Web:

Hubbard’s Cupboard:  This site has complete Christian curricula for ages 2, 3 and 4.  The two’s curricula is unit-study based, with two topics per month and a Biblical theme that goes through the whole month.  The three’s curriculum is organized around Bible stories for each week, as well as a letter of the week and a nursery rhyme of the week.  The four’s curriculum has a character theme for each week, and goes into early reading instruction.  There has obviously been a ton of work put into these curricula.  The three’s curriculum from this site is the curriculum that I tried to use a year ago that just didn’t work for us.  I’m sure it would be a great fit for other families, especially if the parent enjoys the prep time spent printing and cutting things out and preparing the lessons for each week.  I liked a lot of things about the 4′s curriculum (it has a lot less “busy work” to print and cut out), but since Madeline doesn’t really seem ready to make that leap beyond the letter sounds into actual reading, I didn’t think it would be a good fit for us at this time.

Letter of the Week: This website offers complete curricula for birth (really!) to approximately age three or four, with quite a number of additional curricula (phonics, kindergarten science, basic spelling and other topics) still partially complete and under development.  The two main preschool curricula on the site are the “Preparatory Curriculum” and the actual “Letter of the Week” curriculum.  The “Preparatory Curriculum” is essentially a series of 26 unit studies with suggested books and activities to teach basic concepts like colors, shapes, numbers and letter recognition.  The “Letter of the Week” curriculum spends 38 weeks covering the letters and their sounds (the vowels are done for two weeks each to teach the short and long vowel sounds, plus weeks are scheduled for reviewing).  The lesson plan for each week suggests quite a variety of activities and suggested story books that all somehow relate to the letter for the week.  I’ve never used these curricula personally because the style just didn’t appeal to me, but I’m sure other families will find this to be a great option.

Activity or Topic-based Curricula (available for purchase in book or electronic formats)

Two curricula I’ve purchased:

Bright Beginnings:  This is the curriculum we are using this year.  It could be used with kids ages 3-5, as long as you are willing to tailor the activities to the individual child’s ability level.  This curriculum comes as two books, with the first volume being daily lesson plans. Each lesson starts out with a Bible story and related activity.  There are also pre-reading and math activities for each day, as well as character development and “health, safety and manners” topics on alternating days.  Space is also provided on each day’s lesson plan to add activities from the appendixes in the second volume.  Activities are suggested for “God’s world” (essentially, unit studies on common preschool topics ranging from holidays to animals to “community helpers), music, art, PE, and even special snacks.  One great thing about this curriculum is you can use as much or as little as you want of each day’s lessons and the appendix activities, and (at least so far for me), it has been fairly easy to morph the activities to match Madeline’s ability level.  This curriculum costs about $40 new, but I was able to find it used for about $25 shipped.

Little Hands to Heaven: I purchased this curriculum last spring at the same time I purchased Bright Beginnings.  I purchased two thinking I would pick the one I liked better and resell the other.  Well, I ended up keeping this one too.  Little Hands to Heaven has a very strong Bible emphasis, with suggested Bible readings, songs, devotionals, and hands-on activities.  There are also basic letter recognition/letter sound activities, and simple math, art and science activities.  The curriculum is suggested for ages 2-5, and the Bible activities would definitely appeal to kids anywhere in that age range.  My impression of the other activities, however, was that they would be more suited to an older two- or three-year old than a four- or five-year-old.  Most of them would have been too basic for where Madeline is at this fall.  But, I decided to hang on to it for possible use with our other children when they are two or three (and all the kids, even ones older than preschool at the time, would probably enjoy a lot of the Bible activities). The curriculum itself costs about $34 new, and there would be an additional expense if you purchased the specific children’s Bible, children’s devotional and CD set that they recommend (though you could definitely use the curriculum without these, and substitute whatever materials you had on hand).  I was able to purchase the curriculum along with one of the suggested Bibles for about $25 used.

Other Curricula I’ve Found on the Web (but don’t know very much about personally):

ABC Home Preschool: Available in Binder, CD or Download format for ages 2,3 and 4-6.  Appears to be very worksheet-based with some hands-on activities.  Cost is about $130 for a binder of dry-erase pages, or $30 for a CD or download version.

Cait’s Christian Preschool Curriculum: Available as a CD with worksheets, activity ideas, projects, games, and so on.  Cost is about $75 for the CD.

Hands On Homeschooling: Available as a binder of lessons plans for, as the name suggests, hands on activities to teach a complete array of preschool subjects.  Separate curricula are offered for ages 2,3,4 and 5.  Cost is $80 to $100 depending on which age you are purchasing.

Learning at Home — Preschool and Kindegarten: A book of lesson plans utilizing library books and hands-on activities.  Available on Amazon for about $40.

Literature-based Curricula:

Sonlight:  If you enjoy reading books to your kids for hours and want to focus less on pre-planned activities, then Sonlight might be for you.  Sonlight currently offers two preschool curricula – one to use with 3 to 4-year-olds, and one to use with 4 to 5-year-olds.  The 3/4 curriculum is simply a package of books, along with a music CD set and a few educational games, with no lesson plans or worksheets.  The 4/5 curriculum does come with weekly lesson plans for reading through the books during the school year, and also ads in a few worksheets.  A complete package of the 3/4 curriculum costs almost $270, while a complete package of the 4/5 curriculum costs about $335.  Of course, you could purchase the books separately elsewhere, or even find many of them at the library for free.  Just the instructor’s guide with the lessons plans for the 4/5 curriculum is about $19, and the suggested workbooks would set you back about $40.  Most of the suggested books in the two Sonlight preschool curricula are available from the Minneapolis library system, so we are reading through many of these books (not following any particular schedule), along with our other preschool activities.

Winterpromise: This is a newer (I think anyway), company that aims to provide literature-based curricula that have a few more hands-on activities than Sonlight’s curriculums provide.  Their preschool literature program is called “Journeys of Imagination.”  The complete package, which includes the books, is about $140, while just the instructor guide is about $20.  Winterpromise also offers an activity-based preschool program called “I’m Ready to Learn“, which runs $135 for a complete package.  This curriculum gives a weekly schedule for doing various hands-on activities from a variety of books included in the package.

Literature-based Unit Study Curricula:

These curricula blend activities and literature by basing their activities each week around a key book.

“Before Five in A Row” and “Five in a Row”:  The premise of the “Five in a Row” series of books is to take one picture book or story book, read it each day for a week, and then base a series of activities relating to other subjects (math, science, etc) on themes from that book.  Cost of the book of lessons plans is about $25 for “Before Five in A Row” or $35 for each of the three volumes in the “Five in A Row” series.  There is also the additional expense of purchasing the books if you choose to not try and find them at the library.  Some of the books are out of print, resulting in higher prices than you might typically expect for children’s books.

Peak with Books: While not a complete curriculum per se, Peak with Books offers thorough unit studies on quite a large number of children’s books, including many classics and popular titles.  While it is more geared toward classroom use, “Peak with Books” could easily be tailored to home use if you like this format and don’t want to deal with the hassle of the many hard-to-find books that are featured in the “Five in a Row” books. Available on Amazon for about $34 new.

Coming Next: More links! Helpful sites you could use to plan your own home preschool curriculum, find worksheets and craft projects, or just find ideas for other fun, hands-on activties.

I feel like I have had a lot of people ask me lately about what we’re doing with our homeschool preschool, how we do it, and why we chose to do what we’re doing.    Some of the “what” and “how” was in my last post, but this is a bit more of the “why”.  Even if this isn’t of interest to a very large number of people, I might save myself a few repetitive emails and post a few more thoughts on the subject here.

Random Thought #1:  A lot of wise, experienced homeschooling (and probably even some non-homeschooling) parents will tell you that you don’t really need to do much for preschool.  They will tell you that you can just live your life together with your kids, read lots of books, talk about letters and shapes and numbers and colors as things come up, and have fun.  Others will tell you just to buy a few preschool workbooks from Target or the dollar store and that will give your kids adequate preparation.  I’m sure they are all absolutely right.

Random Thought #2: I’m not sure why other people who believe that #1 is true still do some kind of organized or formal homeschool preschool program…but I feel that it is at least 50% for my own sanity.  Two of Madeline’s favorite things are pretend play with me, and doing somewhat organized, structured activities (anything from arts & crafts to board games to science experiments).  Playing alone or with Erik is a real struggle for her most of the time, but my tolerance for pretend play (at least in the way Madeline wants to engage in it), is probably a maximum of an hour per day.  When we play pretend the way Madeline likes to play pretend these days, she is very much directing the action.  While she could probably spend hours directing me how to play out her various scenarios, it doesn’t seem good for her character to spend that much time in a self-centered mode of play.

So, that leaves those more organized, structured activities as her other favorite way to spend time.  All summer and some of last spring when I hadn’t done much planning, Madeline would ask if we could “get out the activity books” and look for activities to do.  She also loves to do arts and crafts projects, but she seems to particularly like it if I give her some direction to start with (suggesting which type of art to do that day, for example).  Coming up with things to do on the spot is exhausting, so having a lesson plan or a curriculum to use is much easier on me.

Random Thought #3: I may be proved wrong about this, but I think having a little bit of structured school time at home now for Madeline as a 4-year-old will help her adjust to the idea of doing “real” school a couple hours a day next year when she is actually kindergarten age.

Random Thought #4: If you are planning to homeschool beyond the preschool years, doing something somewhat more formal or organized for preschool gives you as a homeschool parent a chance to learn about your teaching and organizational style, your child’s learning style, and what you might like or dislike about different homeschooling styles, philosophies, and types of curricula.  While I am by no means decided on what curriculum we will use when Madeline is in Kindergarten next fall, I feel like my research and our experimentation thus far with various styles of homeschooling have helped me cross certain options off the list while giving me ideas of other curricula I would like to research further in the next 9 months or so.

Random Thought #5: It’s really fun to harness the curiosity of a preschooler by helping them go deeper with topics they already ask questions about. Madeline is always asking lots of questions about the weather.  Things like, “Why is it raining?” or “Why is hot in the summer?”.  So, our first unit study has been about weather, and she is learning more about weather terminology, and why weather does what it does.  Another example from the realm of art: Madeline has been trying to mix different colors when she paints, and I was getting really tired of telling her multiple times in an hour how to mix orange or green.  So, we talked about primary colors and made a chart to post on the door of our art cabinet.  Then she asked why the primary colors were primary — why couldn’t we make red or blue yellow like we can other colors.  That answer had to wait for daddy to get home.  I haven’t really broken the news to her yet that the real primary colors are cyan, magenta, and yellow and not red, blue and yellow as the kids art materials claim.

Coming up next or at least soon: helpful homeschool preschool links

We’re now two days in to the 2008-2009 home preschool “school year” in the Hill household.  I decided to purchase a full curriculum called “Bright Beginnings” to use for our preschooling this year.  It’s not a perfect fit, but it has some strengths that I found appealing: I got a good deal on the two books in the curriculum (purchased used), it doesn’t require a ton of prep work for the basic activities, and it is flexible. 

A year ago in the fall we tried out a free online curriculum, but it turned out to not fit our style (too much printing, cutting and other prep work for me…and Madeline didn’t enjoy the activities that I spent so much time to prepare).  

Last winter and spring we tried a patchwork of sources to supply our activity needs.   We tried a bit of the literature-based unit study approach, but Madeline didn’t seem too keen on the idea of spending a week basing all our activities around the same story.  We did some of the activities in the “Teaching a Young Child to Read” book, but it quickly became clear that Madeline wasn’t developmentally ready (and still isn’t ready) to move beyond letter recognition and letter sounds.  Putting those letter sounds together to make words requires (I think) a mental “switch” to flip that just hasn’t flipped for her yet.  We also did an assortment of other activities compiled from various books and websites.  However, the quality of our activities each week seemed to vary greatly based on whether or not I actually had time to do the prep work ahead of time of looking through the books or websites to select activities, gather the necessary materials, and so on. 

Based on these experiences and our growing busyness in life with a preschooler, a toddler and another baby to arrive in late January, I knew I needed to have more of the activities laid out for me.  I also knew I needed to do some prep for the whole year, before the year even started.  I purchased the curriculum late last spring and began reading through it.  I was also able to get a full morning with out the kids around to make a file folder system to keep me on track.  I have a filing box with a folder for each week of the school year.  I had the bindings cut off the “Bright Beginnings” books, and I filed either three or four lesson plans per week into each folder (4 per week this fall, and 3 per week this coming winter/spring after the new baby comes along), along with supplementary worksheets and occasionally other materials.  I also made a folder for each month with a couple of unit studies, and some ideas for science experiments taken from our preschool science books (since the one thing this curriculum is light on is science) I can always go back and add in other activity ideas to the monthly or weekly folders if it seems necessary.   Finally, I made a general supply list of things I need to purchase (especially for the science experiments) so that I will hopefully always just have on hand any supplies the activities call for.

If a family did all the activities that “Bright Beginnings” called for in each lesson/day, it could almost take all day long.  We’re going to focus on the basic activities of pre-reading, math, some of the “health/safety/manners” lessons, and the “God’s world” unit studies (besides adding in a science project or two each week).  I’m not quite sure yet how we will incorporate the daily Bible stories and acompanying activities.  We’re already reading Bible stories every night at bedtime, and her kids class at church is also going through Bible stories…so I’m not sure if it will be confusing or not to have a third spot we are reading from in the Bible at the same time.   We’ll continue to do art, music, and so on spontaneously — those are things that Madeline just loves to do and doesn’t generally need a curriculum to tell her her how to do it.

As we go through the curriculum, some days we will do the activities as written, but if the activities seem to easy or hard for Madeline’s ability level, we’ll try and improvise to come closer to meeting her needs. Many activities in the beginning of the book are more where Madeline was at when she was 2.5 or 3, but toward the end of the book some of the activities would still be over her head, at least with where she is at developmentally right now.  Even if I have to spend a few minutes looking up an idea to replace one that isn’t going to work, I’m so much further ahead having a topic to start from (compared to last spring when I had to think of the topics and the ideas!).

I’m planning that most days we’ll do some preschool in the morning (and try and keep Erik occupied either playing with toys or watching/interacting with us), and have more preschool time in the afternoon while Erik naps.  The days we have a playdate or our new homeschool co-op in the morning, we’ll probably just do our afternoon time unless we can sneak some time in before we leave. We’ll also be trying to get in plenty of read-aloud time.  We started last spring using some recommended preschool book lists from other homeschool curricula and other lists of the best books for kids Madeline’s age.  I’m trying to remember to get several books each week from the library off of these lists, as well as whatever other random books we happen to find each week.

We’re only two days in, but I am feeling somewhat confident that we have a plan in place that will take us through this school year, and get us poised to start our “real” homeschooling next fall when Madeline is kindergarten age.