This week Hayden and I officially started preschool...at home! He is loving it and has asked to do school each day, although for now I am setting aside Monday's and Wednesday's as our school days. Of course I throw in some learning for him every day, but right now at 3 years old I think 2 days of a couple of hours of school time is plenty for him.
I kinda of had a change of plans on how I was planning on teaching him. My original plan had been to use the Before Five In A Row curriculum, but I ended up deciding to just go with a Letter of the Week type curriculum with bits of match, science, reading, etc. One of my main goals is to have Hayden reading before he starts Kindergarten (whether that be in public school or homeschooled.) But we have 2 years because of his February birthday to make that decision.
So I came across Confessions of a Homeschooler and fell in love with her whole website and especially her Letter of the Week curriculum. You can download her Letter of the Week curriculum for just $10!! That is a steal for all the cool things you get! She even provides you with a lesson plan to follow for the week. How much easier does it get than that?? Now I am sure that some of you would prefer to plan your own lessons out, but for those of us that aren't feeling much like a teacher, this works great!! I have everything I need at my finger tips! With the download you even get extras, like a set of Bible verses to go along with each letter, Spanish flash cards to go with each letter, reading lists for each letter and many others. I am in love!!
Hayden has thoroughly enjoyed working through the activities for the Letter A, so I wanted to share a few of the things we have done this week.
We started our week out by going to the Apple Orchard on Saturday. This is one of our most favorite things to do as a family! They don't have a huge selection of apples in yet, but we did get some and of course stopped by the bakery and got some apple "treats" and an apple cider slushy (mm--mm good!!)
Our days started with "Board Time" which consisted of saying the Pledge of Allegiance (for some reason he gets tickled when we do this, but he is already learning alot of the words), going over our Bible verse for the week, checking out the weather and learning the date, and learning a Spanish word for the day. Then we get into our worksheets and activities.
Hayden tracing his "A's"
Putting blocks in the form of an A.
Had to catch this pic...he looks just like Frank working on something!
Then he decided he wanted to stack all the blocks.
Writing "A" is for ant.
The little video has Hayden making a crazy noise when as he used the Do-A-Dot markers (which we both love!) to make his A.
We also worked on some exercises where he sorted uppercase and lowercase letters, sorted smallest to largest, some puzzles. He really enjoyed all the activities we did. We have some of the same type work for our next letter but also add some new activities in with it. I am still learning how to coordinate our work and time, but I think next week will go even more smoothly!
