About three weeks ago I decided that I wanted to start my 2 year old in homeschool preschool this fall (also referred to as "tot school" at this age). I know, I know, children (especially toddlers) learn best through play, and I intend for that to be our main form of learning. But, I also want to intentionally play with my child, and introduce him to numbers, themes, shapes, colors, animals etc. in ways that incorporate play in order to hopefully help foster a love of learning in him from a young age. Also, I just really want some sort of routine in our lives. We've always just sort of gone with the flow of our days. Of course, nap and bed times are generally the same daily but that's about as far as our routine goes. So, I'm hopeful that having goals and plans for each day, week and month of the school year that the routine of "school" will be easy for us to stick to and something we enjoy.
Since I made the home preschool decision I've spent a T O N of time on Pinterest gathering ideas for what to teach, curriculum to use, craft ideas and different themes to cover. Initially I pinned all of these ideas to one board, my Homeschooling board, but eventually decided to separate a lot of my homeschooling pins into different boards based on our weekly themes. After reading hundreds several articles/blogs/others mom's experiences I decided to follow more of a traditional school year calendar. We will have 36 weeks of school, starting the second week of August (originally it was going to be the first week, but we had a last minute family vacation to Colorado come up, so I had to rework all our dates & themes--yay for Colorado, but soooooo much to retype) and ending the third week of May. I'll share our 2016-2017 Preschool Homeschool Calendar (and themes for each week) in a post later this week, but basically it breaks down like this:
- We will have circle time every day, which will be used to go over the Calendar, weather, season, bible verse, bible lesson, number, color, shape, sight words, theme, letter, and song(s) of the year/month/week/day etc. (detailed below)
- We'll have one bible verse for the whole year, which we'll recite daily
- Each month we'll have a bible lesson we learn about (they'll all come from our verse of the year)
- We'll have a color of the month and a shape of the month
- We'll have seasonal sight words with pictures next to each word so he can easily identify what each is, after we talk about what season we're in
- Each week we'll have a new theme, letter, number, and songs to talk about (right now my plan is to only focus on the numbers 1-10 the whole year, so we'll end up going over each one several times until I feel he recognizes it, and if he does that quicker than expected we'll add more)
I've basically got everything for the whole year mapped out, now all I have left to do is decide on what activities we'll be doing for each theme, and if you look at my Pinterest boards you'll see I've already found several of those ideas. So, in short, figuring most of this homeschooling stuff out for a two year old was much easier than I expected, just time consuming. I'd love to hear from you about your experiences with homeschool, tot school, how you started etc so please share them with me below! My next post will be about the teacher and student supplies I purchased and how I have our homeschool room set up, I hope you'll come back for it!
