our homeschooling days

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Our days are filled with play and learning. Most of this time is child-led — John is particularly interested in space and his Legos right now. And May loves reading independently and setting up a grocery store. As far as my planned teaching, we read together morning, noon, and night. Our reading selections are Bible stories, read alouds, and various non-fiction books that we love and learn with. You can see (and print your own copy!) of our Preschool Homeschooling Schedule that we loosely follow as our goals for the week. Basically, that focuses on various areas of learning that I feel are important and I want to be intentional about apart from the children’s interests.

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There is no “we have to cover this today!” We work as we go, letting the child’s interests guide the learning, but also taking advantage of times where some letter or number work may be beneficial. When we sit down at the table, we have been creating Crafts through the Bible (I will share more this week!), abstract art, and Letter of the Week papers (these are already organized in 26 different folders).

We still put up a letter of the week up on on our chart even though the extent of this work with it is reviewing the letter together at our chart and working through our envelopes of hands-on printables. This helps us reinforce a sound and focus on how to print that letter. I always get out the Letter of the Week papers first — for painting, stamping, writing, or coloring. We also work on handwriting at the table with markers for little hands, dry erase markers (with sheet protectors) or with our window markers.

Above is John’s space station with his various Lego creations. We gifted him my brother’s Legos and his imagination, and fine motor skills, are going wild!! It is so amazing to see his sprout into smaller Legos, now preferred over the Duplos.

Below, John is working on activity cards at his “writing station” that he created. He has a clipboard with graph paper and various markers that he’s collected (this is a dry erase marker below included in the 50 Activity Cards set! — we also like to put these together with a binder ring for in the car!). He loves having this station and his sister is definitely NOT allowed near it.

Above May is working on some Letter N pages. It’s nice to have these all together and easily reinforce one letter while she’s creating. She loves her Do-a-Dot markers and stamps the letter too!!

Below is our chart. I detail in our Preschool posts what we include inside. This is so fun because John was the teacher and he organized where he wanted everything and he taught us our letter and poem and Bible verse <3

You can see our chart a bit better above, along with our hundreds chart that John recites almost every day. He can count to one hundred, with just a touch of help from me, and count by tens perfectly! It’s fun that he loves to do it and we just count various times of the day. We also have had our Spring Flower Identification Cards out, as well as little “O” animals and an animal chart. (For a list of most of the free cards we use, check out here.)

Below, John is oh so proud of himself for creating this little robot out of stickers. This was surprising to me because he is not a fan of stickers usually, but I think he loved these because he loves robots right now.

Below John is working on some fun truck Letter pages using Do-a-Dot markers. He began writing all the letters and it was very exciting work!!

May always loves to work with watercolor paint.

John and I wrote every letter — uppercase — together on the window with window markers. He loved doing this and was so excited!! I am so happy with his progress with handwriting — it is coming slowly but surely. I am not pushing him to write letters, as he is not progressing with this very quickly, because I don’t want to discourage him and follow his pace. I will encourage more writing this fall, after he turns five.

On Reggio and what my son and daughter are and are not

A little creation using our cans and some rocks — May will regularly create formations like this, whereas John will not. I find this interesting — because in a lot of the Reggio books and blogs I read, children are creating worlds and imagining spaces. I think my daughter will be that way — interested in rhythms and patterns in objects. My son is not. He loves imaginative play, but he does not create it either in his written work, modeled (playdough) work, or represented with objects. He uses his imagination for real-life modeling. And he uses concrete objects, such as his love of Legos, presently, to create real worlds.

Every child is different. We must know their strengths, their weaknesses, and their desires — so we can invite them to progress given their interests and skill sets.

May was excited to use our Cuisenaire rods on our sandpaper numbers.

John and I began making and adding together sums of ten. We counted by tens and continued to add tens to a formation. He thinks in whole terms — building that makes sense to him. The cuisenaire rods are perfect for beginning math work. We also just bought and received our Spielgaben set, which we will have a post up about soon — and how this is working with my abstract and non-abstract learners!!