Chip and I decided that for preschool and possibly kindergarten, we will be homeschooling Elijah. I am excited that he can get a head start on learning and that I can take control of his curriculum! Since Elijah will be two and a half in October, I thought this would be a great time to start! Much of what I read encourages beginning early on memorization techniques and sight words. I began with the idea that I would come up with a different theme every week. Our first theme was The Beach since we stated in August. Since then, (we are on week 5) I have evolved into two curriculums that I have found online. One is http://www.abcjesuslovesme.com/ ABC Jesus Loves Me is one of the two free curriculums I use. The other is http://www.letteroftheweek.com/preschool_age_3.html. Both are bible based and free which is awesome. I use the letter of the week to create our themes and structure but I use ABC Jesus Loves Me for our bible stories and in setting goals. I find that these two sites compliment one another quite well. I also purchased a homeschool planner which is bible based and not only helps me organize our school week but my home duties as well. I highly recommend The Well Planned Day Planner to any mom trying to organize her life at home and especially those wanting to homeschool! It has a lot more organization than I need for a two year old which is actually awesome because it is an organizer that I can grow with and will work for our family as my children’s education evolves and once they start going to traditional school, which is currently the “plan”, I can use this to help me supplement their education.
One other element that I want to mention is our Preschool Prep dvd set. I found it on Groupon for half off but it would have been worth every penny to pay full price. Elijah loves the videos and has memorized about 20 sight words. I also purchased flash cards that go along with it and am planning on getting him the easy readers. These videos have been an amazing supplement our little “school” and Elijah has learned so much. I prefer to limit television, even educational but the fact of the matter is with two infants that need lots of attention, having my preschool prep videos on hand is a great way to maximize Elijah’s learning time even when the twins need my undivided attention.
I got a few pictures of our first week of school. Elijah really seems to enjoy the structure and the projects that we do together and the twins love watching their big brother in action!
One of the tools I used for our beach theme was our own family photo book of Elijah’s first vacation which was at the beach! He really enjoyed seeing pictures of himself as a baby crawling around in the sand as we talked about the beach.
Elijah has been able to count to ten and beyond for some time but we are now working on applying counting to objects. I found some awesome websites where you can design your own worksheets. The first week we applied counting to three sea shells which Elijah was then allowed to color.
One of our art projects was making colored “sand” using salt and sidewalk chalk. we then layered it in a jar.
The finished product
Our Bible story was the Story of Jesus’ breakfast by the beach. One morning, Elijah and I acted out the story using his swimming pool, a fishing net and then ate our “breakfast by the beach”
Catching fish just like Jesus’s friends did!
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