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Sometime in the months following Madeline’s third birthday, she made it to a developmental step that really made her seem like a real preschooler — pretending became her favorite way to play. Young children begin the pretending journey when they are barely able to talk. I remember Madeline getting a toy phone for her first birthday, and she knew exactly what to do with it.

But there is something special about preschool-age pretending. It moves from a simple, “I’m pretending to make you some eggs.” to “Let’s play dinner. I’m the dad and I’m going to work. You’re the mom and you are going to stay home and cook dinner. When I get home, we’ll sit at the table and eat. Okay?”

The kids and I generally spend at least an hour a day engaging in pretend play, acting out various scenarios together. Sometimes, it feels like the three of us spend all day doing this (or at least all day when it’s not meal time, computer time, or TV time). Well, it’s really just me and Madeline doing the pretending — Erik is occasionally assigned a part in the drama by Madeline which I have to help him act out, and other times he just plays with his toys, while we chatter away.

Sometimes the scenes we act out are the typical preschooler fare of playing house (well, mostly the cooking and eating meals part of playing house), playing with baby dolls (Madeline is almost always the mommy to the baby dolls, of course), playing doctor to both people and animals, and playing with blocks to build castles inhabited by small plastic figurines that stand in as a king, prince, princess, and so forth (Yesterday, the Barney with the raincoat was the king, Bert was a prince, and a Pooh in a bunny costume came to visit. But Madeline decided there was no room in the castle tower, so the Pooh figurine couldn’t stay for dinner. Later, after a castle expansion, Elmo came calling and was allowed to stay for a meal.)

Madeline also thinks of many other creative ways to pretend. We’ve been playing “beach” the last couple of days. This involves “packing up” — one of her favorite pretending devices. We find some kind of appropriate bag, and go around the house finding real or pretend items to fill it. The beach bag contained real swimsuits and a beach towel, an empty plastic bottle to stand in for sunscreen, a play cell phone, pretend keys, and Madeline’s sunglasses. At first the play was pretty typical — we pretended to drive to the beach, we pretended to put on swimsuits (Madeline really put hers on), we “swam” around the living room, and we made “sand castles” out of various types of blocks.

Then Madeline decided we were going to play “crab” at the beach. “One person does a crab walk, over there in the water,” she told me, “then you try to come and swim in the water, but the crab is in the way, and the crab comes and grabs you.” We took turns playing a few basic variations on this for a while. Then Madeline decided the crabs were having a marching band in the water. Then the crabs got on a plane and went far away on vacation (this turned into hide-and-seek and I had to go “find the crab” in her faraway vacation spot aka the corner of the kitchen).

Besides playing beach, Madeline has also enjoyed playing “bear cave” (our play tent is the cave), “slumber party”, “going to grandma’s house”, and “glass slipper ball” just to name a few of her many scenarios.

I know that just pretending for the sake of pretending is an important part of development, but I’m also trying to make the most of the time. I try and challenge Madeline to think creatively by asking her challenging questions or taking the scenario in a direction she might not expect. Lessons on character or manners or social skills can easily become part of almost any pretending situation. And of course I fit in opportunities to talk about the usual preschool stuff like letters, numbers, colors, shapes, etc.

I don’t always enjoy the pretending. Sometimes it is down right exhausting. I occasionally wonder if Madeline enjoys it so much because it puts her in the drivers seat. I also wonder how beneficial it would be if she could have more opportunities to pretend with kids her own age or a little older. Whatever the case, I’m sure we will be doing much more pretending in the days to come.

Having ditched the first curriculum we started, I now had to decide how we should spend our time. Since it was early to mid October when we decided to take a different path, a logical next stop on our journey seemed to be focusing on seasonal and holiday topics like fall, Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas.

We really haven’t been doing anything too fancy with our preschool time — I’ve been finding books at the library most weeks related in some way to one of the timely topics, and we find some time each week to do some related crafts. I unfortunately feel like I have been slighting Christmas. Between the expected activities that take up time during the Christmas season (baking cookies, shopping for gifts, holiday parties, etc) and the unexpected events in our life (like two hours spent waiting for a tow truck after the car died while we were en route to the library or Madeline getting sick or friends dropping in), we’ve barely cracked open the door to the craft cabinet, much less me spending time picking out crafts directly related to Christmas. I guess we have a few more days to do something about that.

My goal has been to have more of a plan to go with after the first of the year. I do have one piece of that plan — a book called “Teaching a Young Child to Read“. This book is divided into 27 “kits” or segments with ideas to take a child from simple letter recognition to basic phonics and all the way through some fairly complex reading comprehension. I checked out several “how to” books from the library on teaching reading, and this one was my favorite. It uses methods that seem sensible and easy to implement.

I also decided I’d like to experiment with some kind of a literature-based curriculum to see how this works for us. The books “Before Five in A Row” and “Five in a Row” are somewhat-popular options that take this approach. The idea with these curricula is to read the same book for five days in a row, and base a variety of activities from all subject areas around the themes of the book. I checked these books out from the library to evaluate them, but I wasn’t convinced that they were the right fit for us. I found a similar book called “Peak with Books” that I now have checked out from the library. It looks promising. “Peak with Books” covers fewer subject areas than the “five in a row” books, but it’s activities appear to be more creative extensions of the books it covers. I think we might like the books suggested in “Peak with Books” better as well.

I really can’t say right now if these approaches are really going to work for us. But I am looking forward to trying a new plan…maybe by the fall of 2008 we’ll be on to something completely different!

Of course no matter what approaches or curricula we use , I’m sure we’ll still be doing lots of crafts and seasonal activities, and some math and science related stuff here and there in addition to our reading and literature fare.

Two other new developments in our preschool journey are Madeline’s newly-found love for complex, in-depth pretending, and the home preschool co-op we started attending about once a week this fall…but I’ll save those for another post!

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!).

Here’s a quick catch-up on some happenings at the Hill house:

I’ve finally caught up on posting pictures to our photo gallery.  I haven’t added captions yet, but I hope to go back and do that soon.  Most of it should be pretty self-explanatory, anyway. So, for your viewing pleasure we now have albums for August, Early September (including a trip to the zoo), and Mid-September (including recent trips to an apple orchard and the Children’s Museum).

As Erik nears six months old, he now has one tooth on the way in! He has been gnawing away at anything he can get his hands on for several weeks, and finally the sharp little point of a tooth appeared on his lower gums yesterday! Luckily, he hasn’t been too crabby so far from the teething process.

Madeline has finally entered the dreaded “why” phase.  For several weeks she has been asking a lot of other recurring questions including,  “What’s ______ for?”, “What kind of _____ ?”, “Where did _____ go?” (asked about anywhere we are going or about any place we have left).   I thought those were slightly annoying at times, but at least there was a bit of variety.  Then out of the blue, she started asking “Why?” yesterday.  She asked the other questions a couple of times today, but otherwise her response was “Why?” to pretty much anything I had to say.  I had no idea how quickly that could really grate on me, and now I know exactly why parents are known for saying “BECAUSE I SAID SO!”  I came up with some good coping strategies (like giving overly complex answers) to get her to stop asking some of the other questions when it was getting old, so I am sure I will find some good coping strategies for this phase too. I know it is great that she is curious, but I also know that some of it is just to get on my nerves, because I have already seen the sly little smile as she continually asks the question.

This fall I have started doing some home preschool activities with Madeline.  I’m sure she could learn through whatever we did, whether it was something organized or something informal, but having a curriculum to follow and a daily plan of action really helps me from just falling back on the same few activities all the time.  I’m just not very creative at thinking on my feet to come up with new games, crafts, and so on for her to do…and she is often asking me for new things to do! We’re using a free curriculum for three-year-olds I found on the web called “Bible and Rhyme“.  A lot of the curriculum activities are the general type of thing we’d be doing anyway — reading books, singing songs, playing games, doing art, etc…but the writer of this curriculum has way better ideas and better ways of grouping them together than I would ever come up with!

We’re just finishing our third week, and we’ve had some ups and downs already.  The first two weeks Madeline asked to do it every day (even though the curriculum is only planned for 3x per week), and then today she didn’t want to do it at all after getting frustrated with one of the games yesterday.  :-(   But it is great to get started after spending nearly a year and a half researching and considering what to do.  We haven’t been doing every activity and we may modify it further to suit our needs as I better understand how Madeline likes to learn.  But I would definitely recommend it to anyone looking to work with a preschooler at home.  I’m sure I’ll have more blog posts in the future about our preschool activities.