Preschool Journal for October 2008
While the month of October isn’t quite over, our “home preschool month” is pretty much done. Madeline is spending a couple days this week at Grandma Karen’s house, and then we’ll be busy with Halloween activities the rest of the week – baking and decorating pumpkin and leaf-shaped sugar cookies, going to a “trick or treat with the seniors” event at a nearby retirement home, attending a costume party put on by my MOPS (Mothers of Preschoolers) group, and probably making some pumpkin-themed crafts.
At the end of last month, we were just starting to dabble in some “learning to read” programs on the computer. After doing free trials of Headsprout and Reading Eggs, as well as checking out some CD-based reading/phonics programs from the library, we decided to have Madeline continue on with Reading Eggs past the two week free trial.
Headsprout was a great program (at least for the three episodes Madeline got to try), but it was pretty spendy – it would cost about $80 to purchase just the first half of the program. The CD-based options from the library were pretty junky and not very helpful. Madeline completed about 10 lessons of Reading Eggs in her two week trial, and seemed to be learning a lot and enjoying the process. Buying a six month subscription cost $35, and we decided this was worthwhile since she would likely finish the entire program in that length of time. While in some ways I would have rather spent that $35 on something we could have used over and over again, there is something to be said for paying for something that your child really enjoys in the learning process.
Madeline’s desire to learn to read, and her desire to spend time each day working on her Reading Eggs lessons, threw me for a loop in handling the rest of our preschool lessons. With her working on reading skills on the computer, it didn’t make sense to focus a lot of time on doing other language-related lessons from our curriculum. Also, the daily lessons for the math and language sections in our curriculum have moved on to actually being about 50% handwriting lessons. I knew this was coming and hoped to spend some time working on doing a bit of writing with her…but with a lot of her energy and brain power going toward learning to read, she was even less interested than usual in practicing writing. That completely made sense to me, so I didn’t want to push it. We did a few other things here and there from the daily curriculum lessons, but each week’s folder (I divided up the lessons into folders before the school year started) contained only a scant few lessons that seemed appropriate given what else was going on.
We finished up our unit on “Fall” at the beginning of the month, and I attempted to start a unit on Nutrition next. It was only “attempted” because Madeline did not take to this at all. She got bored of the books I picked out half way through, and wasn’t very interested the other activities I thought up either. We didn’t even do very many science experiments or character-topic lessons this month, because when I didn’t have a specific day in mind to do them, I found it easy to put it off thinking we would do it a different day…and often that “other day” never came.
We did enjoy a lot of time this month playing educational board and card games — something that I think can be just as valid a method of learning as any for preschoolers. Madeline really enjoys “go fish”, so we played with playing cards, alphabet cards (matching an upper case to its lowercase equivalent), and cards I made with numbers from 11-20. We also enjoyed games of Memory, Candy Land, Chutes and Ladders and Cranium Cariboo.
My plan for next month is to ditch the file folder system that I had been using to organize my lessons plans for the week. Instead, I am going to take a three-hole punch and stick all the pages in a binder. That way, we can move through the activities in each subject at an appropriate pace and not be constrained to doing a certain number of pages/daily lessons per week. We might move through several weeks of math activities if many of them are easy, while taking our time on the language lessons if Madeline is still spending time each day doing Reading Eggs. That organizational method will also allow me to more easily move around the curriculum to pick and chose character areas to study, and to maybe include a few Bible activities that I will match up with what we are reading in our bedtime Bible reading times.
I’m also going to assign our lesson areas other than math and reading/language arts to various days of the week in hopes that this will cause us to be more faithful to doing them. For example, we might do a character topic lesson every Monday, a science project every Tuesday, etc. I’m sure these daily plans will end up re-arranged some weeks, and that’s okay. I think it’s kind of like menu planning – it saves me a lot of time to plan something out for each day of the week ahead of time. But, I do it in pencil and feel free to re-arrange if I’m not going to have time to make something on a particular day, or if soup sounds better on the coldest day of the week rather than what turns out to be the warmest.
Heading into November, we’ll also try some new unit studies. Of course, in the latter part of the month we will study Thanksgiving. In the first part of the month, I had planned we would do a unit study on Fish. Hopefully Madeline will find that a more enjoyable topic than our attempt to study nutrition!