*~* August Preschool Thread *~* - Page 3

[Khourtniey]

Andrea, I have a 2 year old at home, but he functions like an infant.. He is special needs and requires a lot of care.. I work my school around his care. He is involved with some of the school stuff (like messing up my pretty stacks of papers)

[Andiad]

Originally Posted by Khourtniey

Andrea, I have a 2 year old at home, but he functions like an infant.. He is special needs and requires a lot of care.. I work my school around his care. He is involved with some of the school stuff (like messing up my pretty stacks of papers)

Thanks Khourtniey! Just curious, if you don't mind sharing, what your HS'ng day looks like w/both kids.
If others don't mind sharing as well.....I'm really curious what the "day in the life of a homeschooled preschooler" looks like.

[Khourtniey]

Well mine is quite different than the typical. My 2 year old has a nurse during the day so he pretty much stays in his room (has too much equipment to move around from room to room). He is connected to a ventilator that only has so much slack, so me and my older son go out of his reach in his room.

Our typical homeschool time is at night, but we work things in schoolwise during his old playtimes.. Sometimes instead of playing cars we will work on colouring or just simple stuff like that..

Schedule/routine wise it looks a lot like this:

Wake
breakfast
dishes
play time/school time
lunch
play time
snack
school time
dinner
play
play
play
school
then bath and bed


My youngest requires care every 2 hours (feeds, respiratory treatments, caths, meds, etc).. My older boy helps a lot with that and he is also learning all about medical stuff. When I do not have nurses we all stay in my youngest sons room (we literally only leave for potty and food breaks) and we play and do school in between the care.

We do a lot of unschooling stuff, so whilst doing the dishes for instance we will work on counting them, or naming thier colours or shapes and the same for other play time. I try to make everything a learning experience.. Not just counting and colours but other stuff that (I feel) school does not teach.. Like life lessons.

The nice thing about homeschooling is that you do not have to have a set time to do a certain subject like in regular school... Math at 9.30 everyday in regular school might be the typical, but for us math can be at 9.30am or 3pm and Im not stressing if Its 5pm and we still have not covered anything.

[nathansmom]

We really don't have a set time period but this week (which I decided was the beginning of our year) we've found that right after breakfast is the perfect time for us. I plan on a hour to a hour and a half but if we need more time or less time we are flexible.

This week we've done the following:
Read about cowboys and visited a local old farm.
Read about firefighters and visited our fire station.

Also we've done the first 3 pages of Handwriting without tears prek workbook. Drawn pictures of anything we find interesting. Work a little with the Singapore earlybird math workbook and work on fine motor skills with practice tracing lines.

[Love_My_Babies]

I have been following this thread, but I was afraid to post because of the heat I got on another thread for calling myself a homeschooler when my oldest is 31 months. Here I go...

We are using www.letteroftheweek.com. We started the 26 week long prep curriculum, which essentially introduces colors, shapes, letters, numbers, etc. The letters and numbers part of this specific 26 weeks is letter and number recognition (i.e. when Hayden looks at a letter "Aa", he knows it is a letter and not a drawing) and nothing more at this point. Then next series of 26 weeks is letter recognition with sound association (i.e. Hayden looks at a letter, knows it is a letter and not a drawing, and recognizes that the letter is a symbol for the sound).

Hayden has no idea we are doing school. He thinks we are just doing cool stuff while his brother is sleeping. He is right! We are playing with a purpose!

We started last week, and the theme was cows. The vocab word was calf, letter a, number 1 and shape square. We collected a ton of cow, calf, letter a, etc. books at the library. We sang "Hey Diddle Diddle" and "Old McDonald" over and over all week. We did a ton of reading (books and poems), coloring, painting, singing, etc. all week.

Our week wrapped up with a visit to a friend's farm where some of her fall cows were calving early. I was so very proud of being a homeschooler when ds turned to me and said, "Look mama...a calf!" Calf was our vocabulary word, and it was so gratifying for him to make the connection from our classroom (also the living room floor!) and the real world.

Our theme this week is Jungles, vocab word is vines, letter b, number 2, color green. We read The Jungle Book and Jungle Drums (amazing illustrations) this morning, and ran around the house acting like jungle animals swinging from vine to vine.

Looking forward to k and the grades, we will probably lean toward a more holistic style and curriculum (really liking enki right now). For the time being, we are just doing the things that Hayden's playmates are doing when they go to preschool on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

[Swallace]

I have a 4 year old and recently turned 3 year old that i am homeschooling.
I cannot wait talk with you all more about all this.

[StormySar]

Subbing, we plan to start hsing my dd on Monday... Getting very excited :-)

I am still planning what i'd like to cover, subject wise and am interested in reading through what others plan to cover and how you have your year planned. I have not yet read through everything in thsi thread yet so maybe people already have posted such things :-)

[*Jessica*]

Hi! We'll be starting preschool with Nik on Sept 10th so it's time for me to join this thread. I'm very excited to be here.

Our homeschooling philosophy is closest to that of Charlotte Mason. I love a lot of the Waldorf ideas as well. So we're mixing the two and adding some Slow and Steady, Get Me Ready activities for my 2 year old, who will want to be doing everything his brother does.

So our first week's books/activities will be:
opening verse (daily)
I Knew a Gnome by Trevor Smith Westgarth (poem)
The Song of the Hazelnut Fairy by Cicely Mary Barker
The Song of the Acorn Fairy by Cicely Mary Barker
Rainbow Bird by Eric Maddern
The Great Kapok Tree by Selby Beeler
The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein
Red Leaf, Yellow Leaf by Lois Ehlert
make collages using nuts, seeds, and spices
nature walks and journal
make music with pieces of wood
have a fire and roast marshmallows
gather toys from nature (stones, sticks, etc)
observe a tree
find a stump to sit on like the old man in The Giving Tree
gather maple leaves
go apple picking
sort nuts
make apple dolls
identify things in our house that come from trees
make apple crisp
artist: John James Audubon
composer: Bach
habit to work on: even temper

I'm sure we won't do it all, and that's fine, but I like to have ideas. I'm a list maker! Our artist "study" is simply a picture of that artist's hanging on the wall, and composer "study" means we'll listen to that composer in the car. He has a terrible temper (like his Momma ) so we're going to try to find solutions together to control it.

Nate, who just turned 2, will be having fun with "Top & Bottom" from Slow & Steady.

[AngelBee]

Originally Posted by alegna

Subbing for ideas. We're really going to work on finding homeschool friends this year. Most of the kids her age in playgroup are off to preschool this year... :

-Angela

I know what you mean. That is how it is for Abigail this year as all fo her friends start Kindergarden.