After you know what the law for your state is you start to plan the curriculum. I'm a planner so this has been kind of fun for me, but knowing where to start can be a little stressful. The first thing we did was look into the general things that "should" be known or taught by the end of Preschool and Kindergarten. Our daughter is a preschooler, but we wanted to set long term goals. GOALS are important. You need to set reachable short term and long term goals. For example our daughter is not as familiar with letters so our short term goal is for her to recognize and know the sounds of her letters and our long term goal is for her to be able to read and recognize sight words easily.
Once you set the goals for your child it is fairly simple to put together a curriculum. You just figure out fun activities that can be used to help your child meet the goals you set. For example, for the long term goal activities Sight words are words that are easily recognizable by sight such as a, I, am, at, cat, this, and that. Flash cards and highlighters can easily make affordable sight cards. The sight card can be used in many ways one of which is showing her the word, telling her what it is and sounding out the letters. This helps us incoroporate her long term goal with the short term goal of learning and recognizing letters. We have found that she enjoys tracing the letters in her workbook and doing the activities that are connected to each letter. There are also plenty of free youtube videos with alphabet songs and lessons on sounding out the letter sounds. She enjoys those along with some apps that allow her to use her fingers, rhymes, and, flashcards to learn letters, numbers, shapes, colors, ect.
For math we use actual coins to teach her the difference in the coins and their monetary value. Number songs and the MEAD Preschool workbook (lets just go ahead and say we use that for pretty much every subject) she enjoys the workbook and we're happy to do it with her. One of her favorite ways to learn numbers is playing with her Doc McStuffins UNO cards with her dad. :D She sorts them by number and color, she can put them in order from 0-9.
There are plenty of other brilliant ideas to help us reach our short term and long term goals and keep her entertained and learning. Which brings me to Pinterest. I love Pinterest! You can easily find hundreds of activities and lesson ideas with a simple homeschool search (and by adding the grade level for a more precise search). If you're child is on the Preschool/Kindergarten level you may find the things on my pinterest Homeschool board ( http://www.pinterest.com/duckylove610/homeschooling/ ) helpful, I know I did. ;)
We try to make learning fun for our little duckling :) She has a very energetic spirit and loves to be interactive. It's important to remember preschoolers are not easily focused. Sometimes we are able to get 2 activities done and then she wants to play outside or something which is okay :D Other times we get one activity done and then she's ready to eat (she loves to eat) and that's okay too. We're moving at her pace and even when we're not doing activities, life provides a million opportunities for us to teach her. When she's playing outside she's is learning how different things have different colors and textures. She learns he difference between plants and animals and even some of the different species. While in the car she is recognizing letters on signs one of my favorite times being when we passed the H sign for the hospital and she excitedly let us know "It's one of my letters!!!!!". She also made us super proud when we were talking and said Victory to hear her tell us "V vvvv Victory!!!"
Everyday life is a great way to teach her right now, so what we do is...We keep it light. We explore. We live. We grow. We learn. We have fun!
No comments:
Post a Comment