We have completed our first full month of homeschool! Yay us! This is my cousin’s first year of homeschool (sometimes I call her my niece by mistake so just a heads up there) and I think she is doing so well! She is 10 years old and was supposed to be entering 5th grade. Her mom took her out of public school because she can’t read and her teachers kept passing her to the next grade instead of teaching her. Now I have the privilege of teaching her!
My daughter and were doing preschool at home before I moved the the farm. We were really just playing with Montessori toys, singing songs, and and reading books. I liked to call it school. She just turned 3 so she is learning her letters, counting, and life schools. She loves school and that’s what I want to talk about today: Preschool At Home!
Curriculum
I just want you to know, you don’t need to purchase a curriculum for preschool. But… If you’re looking around for a preschool curriculum, let me tell you about what we have. My sister bought this Preschool In A Box (currently listed for $275) for us. It has lesson plans for every letter of the alphabet with activities in several areas of learning, including math, science, and crafts! Check out the video below of my daughter and I unboxing it. Leave me a comment if you’d like a post showing the lesson plans and materials included!
Learning Letters
My daughter gets so excited when she sees letters she has learned when we are out in public.In addition to the Preschool in a Box, we do several other fun activities to learn our letters.
Sign Language
When we start a new letter, the first thing we do is make the letter sound and the sign. I don’t add anything else until she can tell me the sound and sign of the letter without help. Sometimes that means we don’t learn anything new for a couple of days. Once she’s got the letter sound and sign down, we learn some words that start with that letter. For example, for letter ‘e’, we learned the signs for egg and eagle. We haven’t talked about ‘e’ for about a week now, and this morning, our lesson was all review. She still remembered all the signs for letter ‘e’ without any help. The picture to the right is the chart we use.
I’m not going to pretend to know all of the brain science behind this concept, but what I do know is that sign language helps children learn and understand words. Something about the visual cue with the verbal cue helps them retain and recall what they’ve learned. You can read more about it in this article.
Books
If you’ve ever gotten any GOOD child training advice, you must have heard that you should read to your child as much as possible. I definitely don’t read to my daughter as much as I should (I need to put that on my daily checklist), but we do read together.
We also do, what I call, letter hunts. I’ll have her go get her favorite book, and she always comes back with more than one. So for each book, I’ll ask her to find a certain letter that she has learned. Sometimes we read the books. sometimes we just do letter hunts and talk about the pictures, especially when the pictures start with the letter we are hunting for. This is a hit or miss activity. She either loves it and wants to hunt through every book we own OR she doesn’t make it past the third page.
Magazine Clipping Collages
This is one of my daughter’s favorite activities. She loves to use the scissors and glue. I try to give her a piece of construction paper that begins with the letter we are doing, like blue for ‘b’. The collage we did in the photo was just birds (we’d just gotten the new Birds & Blooms issue in the mail so it was simple). I did all of the important cutting. Her cutting was for fun/practice. We probably said “bird starts with B!” about a thousand times and made lots of ‘b’ sounds and practiced our sign every time we said ‘b’. It was a very repetitive activity but… ask her what bird starts with.
Counting
I hate to bore you… but this one is pretty straight forward. We count everything: Fingers, toes, scoops of coffee that go into the filter, grapes on the plate at lunch, everything.
I painted some rocks with numbers 1-5 on one side. On the other side, I painted dots that corresponded to each number. She enjoys counting and playing with those. And they’re cute in our rock garden.
Life Skills
We do a couple of different things to work on life skills.
First, we have the chore chart. My daughter loves her chore chart and so do I. In fact, I got jealous and am going to make my own chore chart. To the right you’ll see the chart we are currently on and the updated chart for next week. We have used the current chart for 2 weeks now and chores have been added. We started out with 4 habits or chores: make the bed, brush your hair, brush your teeth, and get dressed. Once she did each of those every day without missing, we added chores to help with laundry, dishes, and going to bed on time.
For each chore she completes, she gets to pick out a sticker and put it on the chart. At the end of the week, if she earned all of her stickers, she gets a honey stick! She really enjoys both of these rewards. If she doesn’t earn all of her stickers, she doesn’t get a honey stick. So far, she’s not gone a week without earning a honey stick, so when it happens, I’ll let y’all know how it goes.
Second, we just do life together. She helps me cook and do my chores. She’s always with me so whatever I do, she’s helping.
And that’s all I’ve got for today!
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