Home Preschool Update — November ’08 through March ’09
So much for monthly preschool updates! Home preschool has definitely had its ups and downs over the past few months. The holidays, end-of-pregnancy tiredness and then having a new baby in the family all slowed down or interrupted our preschool experiences. Luckily, even when “formal” preschool activities for Madeline weren’t a part of our daily routine, she was still learning a lot through daily life, listening to us read books to her…and some fun science experiments with Daddy here and there. 
As no one but me probably recalls, we ended October with me resolving to change my organization system for the curriculum we were using (from weekly file folders to a binder where we could jump around) and Madeline was working on learning to read at a website called Reading Eggs on an almost daily basis.
November got off to a good start. I did try the new organizational method of using a binder for my curriculum pages. This worked okay for the couple weeks in November that I did use it. I still found it frustrating to have to jump around from page to page to find appropriate activities for each subject area. It was also frustrating to start an activity only to find it was too easy for Madeline or could be completed in under five minutes, leading her to ask me to find more activities. As the month of November wore on, we were finding fewer times to sit down and use the preschool curriculum. The holiday season was beginning and I was starting to feel more tired from pregnancy.
Madeline started to lose interest in Reading Eggs by late November. I think this was caused by the program getting more difficult while at the same time she was not really retaining the material (or possibly not learning very well in the first place — the reading eggs lessons offer lots of opportunities to try and try again, so she may have passed the lessons without really learning what they were trying to teach her. She still chooses to do the Reading Eggs lessons occasionally, but I am not sure she is really gaining much in the way of reading skills through it.
We pretty much skipped December, January and February as far as formally doing preschool goes. We did a ton of fun Christmas stuff in December — baking treats, decorating the tree, attending Christmas parties. January is a blur. Madeline played a lot of computer games during what could have been preschool time as I rested from late-pregnancy exhaustion. Baby Kai came to join our family in February. While Tony was taking time off work, Madeline enjoyed some great “science time” with daddy as they did experiments from the “My first Chemistry kit” she got for Christmas.
In January and February and into March Madeline also worked on some of the Preschool Activity Bags I got through two exchanges I participated in. Those weren’t as much of a hit as I had hoped they would be. Some were just too easy and boring for her. Some she did enjoy (especially if I sat down and did it along side her), but in general it wasn’t the independent learning experience I thought it might be.
By late March we had taken a new direction once again. After much research into phonics and math programs, I selected programs I had planned to start Madeline on in the fall for her Kindergarten year. However, I also figured out that both the phonics and math programs I had selected would be very appropriate for her current skill levels in those subjects. I also wanted (again) to find out sooner rather than later if these really weren’t going to work for us, just as previous curriculum choices hadn’t worked out so well.
So, Alphabet Island Phonics and Saxon Math K became our new preschool routine for the past several weeks. More on that in my upcoming “April” update post!