Home Preschool

So because I'm cheap and because I hope we move sometime during this next school year, I decided to home preschool Alex.  I wanted to homeschool Ella too, but she threw a royal fit any time I mentioned it, and besides, she loves school far too much.  I figure they can't mess her up too much in first grade, so off to school she went.

But since I was spending so much time planning what I was going to do for school for Alex, I figured I'd post about it here for anyone who cares to make use of it.  We've already done two weeks, so I'll catch up on those without pictures, since I didn't bother to take any, and then have more in depth posts from here on out.

I've been using a few different resources for planning my school days.  I started out with the book Teach Me Mommy.  I found it at the library and of all the different theme plans I could find I liked the ones in this book the best.  However, I don't love all of them, so I scratched some and added others.  The other thing about this book that's not great is all the books suggested for reading are out of date and not readily available.

To add depth to my themes I've been using the Core Knowledge What Your Preschooler Needs to Know.  Any subjects that weren't covered through the themes that were in this book I added in myself.

I've also gotten ideas from the website Everything Preschool and the fabulous site Lesson Pathways and of course Starfall for reading.

Our science activities are going to come from the book The Best of the Mailbox Science for Preschool and Kindergarten.  The themes covered in this book almost perfectly match the ones in Teach Me Mommy.  It was a great find that wasn't too dumbed down like some kid science books I looked at.

We will be doing piano lessons from 67 Fun Songs Primer.

I get all our reading books from the library, but use Amazon to check the reviews and see which books on which topics are the best.

We're going to do school three times a week, usually Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.  I try to remember to start all our days with a calendar song and weather song, but I don't always remember.  We usually have a discussion of the topic, a song or rhyme, at least two books to read on the topic, an activity, and then a craft or cooking activity.  I don't always go in the same order.  It depends on what the subject is and what we're doing.  I usually have far more planned than we get through on some days, and others we're done in 15 minutes and I'm wondering why it went so fast.

On Tuesday and Thursday and any other day he wants, he does workbook pages from a set of workbooks I ordered here.  They cover cutting and pasting, coloring, numbers, letters, math concepts like before, after, between, animals, habitats, etc.  He does 4-5 or more pages almost every day and loves it.  The beginning book was a bit below his level, but once we got into writing numbers we were right on track.

I've also ordered a Saxon Math course, but it hasn't come yet.  If I like it, it will be included on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

And that's it.  It's all a work in progress, but hopefully someone gets some ideas from this.

Enjoy!