Top Questions I get
1. Where do I start? Start, at the beginning! Start with the basics, and K.I.S.S. (keep it simple, silly. Nothing makes things more frustrating than over complicating things. You will quickly get over whelmed, your child will be more likely to get bored, frustrated, and want to stop if you can't even wrap your head around what you're doing! Colors, shapes, letter and number recognition are always the best places to start. Think of your child's education like a giant pyramid, you can't start working on level 2 if level 1 isn't complete.
2. Where do I get supplies? EVERYWHERE!! My favorite spots are, the dollar store, The dollar spot at Target, Hobby Lobby, Michael's, Walmart and the grocery stores when they have good sales! and GOOGLE!! Searching phrases like "preschool worksheets", "kindergarten worksheets", "preschool/kindergarten printable" will give you an ENDLESS supply of FREE things to use. I buy (cheap) workbooks for preschool and kindergarten and go from there.
3. Where do I get my curriculum/lesson plans? GOOGLE!!!! If you aren't aware, now is the time to learn, THE INTERNET IS YOUR GREATEST SOURCE, ALLY, AND TOOL!! Asess where you need to start, the "basics" your child should know to start kindergarten are very basic (in my opinion) But I am a "go big or go home" kind of teacher! You can go to any school district website and you SHOULD be able to find criteria for what your child should know by the start/end of every grade. This is a great way to determine where your child needs work.
OK, Here we go! I am briefly going to give a run down of our weeks lesson plans and activities. (Please note that I have been working diligently with my son since he was about 2 so our lessons are closer to a kindergarten curriculum, than they are to a preschool one.) I am constantly changing what we are doing based on our schedules/moods/and how interested or uninterested my boys are in what we are doing! So NO JUDGING!
General Week Rundown
Monday-Introduce new concepts, words, ideas, and info
Tuesday-Reinforce Mondays lessons with new worksheets, and activities
Wednesday-Reinforce Monday& Tuesday's lessons w/ new worksheets & Activites
Thursday-Project day! Review briefly what we did over the week and then do a craft project or project relating to our theme for the week
Friday-Play Group
Daily Rundown: Each day our GOAL is at least an hour, 2 hours on a GREAT day! But I am working with a 4 year old and a 15 month old, so everyday varies!
Start right after breakfast is cleaned up(if we wait any longer it doesn't happen because our day gets away from us)
Date/day of the week/month
weather
heart word
Concept/theme of the week
writing activity
math activity
book of the day (I like choosing beginning reader books so my son can work on reading them to me)
I always ask if there is anything he wants to do, like drawing, dot to dots, random worksheet pages he finds fun, or some other educational activity before saying "we're done for today, you can go play"
Week 1- General Focuses *review (from our lack of being on top of things during summer)
*Letter combination "_an" (to make words like, pan, ran, can, fan)
*Introduction to graphs, organizing findings
*Sight words, we call them "heart words" because they are words we need to know by heart :) (and because I got them off a great website find great printables here )
*Our Project this week was colored salts in a baby food jar to make "colored sand" layering each color on top of one another.
Baby distraction: My baby (15 months old) had a hard time not being included in what my 4 year old was doing, so I tried my best to distract him with activities.
I tried letting him color, he ate the crayons, a pencil kept him happy and he didn't seem to want to eat it as much as the crayon!
I let him tear up construction paper
snack
I gave him blocks and a muffin pan and showed him to put one block in each hole
and finally today I gave him an old tissue box full of pom poms, and a mini muffin pan! It turned into a huge mess, but nothing that he wasn't able to help clean up! and it was the best tool I'd found all week!
