Home Preschool Journal, September 2008
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.