This past fall Finley was attending two pre-schools. One at a local church two days a week, and one in a friends home. My friend discontinued her in home preschool in December because she had too much on her plate (totally understandable!). While Finley was sad not to visit with those friends every week and enjoy her wonderful lessons, it did give us more time at home together.
A few weeks ago Finley and I started a more vigorous approach to learning at home. We have always been working on things at home, but school was more sporadic and random. My friend Erika turned me on to this great website of a mom who home schools her children.
No I don't plan on home schooling Finley for his whole life, but it did give us some direction and guidance into what we can and should be working on.
She has a great "Letter of the Week" program with tons of activities and ideas to do for each letter.
The great part is that all the work is done for you! You just have to print things off.
You can download each individual activity for free, or buy the entire program for only $10. I can't tell you how much time this saves me in planning lessons for Finley. I do supplement her ideas and activities with others I find online, but I highly recommend you check out her stuff.
Even though Finley already knows all of his letters, the program is a great review and jumping off point for teaching him how to read. There are also tons of math and manipulative activities that are helping him grow.
There are pre-writing worksheets that he definitely needs to work on!
Writing letters is one of his least favorite things, so when he is not in the mood, I don't push it. He is having fun connecting the dots and tracing things that aren't letters. (I also found the idea online to put worksheets into clear sleeves so he can write on them, then we can wipe them off and reuse them! Genius!)
In addition to review our upper case and lower case letters, we work on counting and numbers.
We start every week off by finding things around the house that start with the letter that we are reviewing that week. (I think this is Finley's favorite part). He is really good at identifying the first letter of words. Now we just need him to understand that the rest of the letters after the first one mean something.
And that not every F word says Finley.
I think one of the things that scares me the most about being a parent is the responsibility of teaching him how to read. I so desperately want him to know how to read before he goes to kindergarten. I am hoping that the things we are working on now will help pave the way as he gets older. The website also has a K4 program that is geared towards 4 and 5 year olds that helps them start learning those reading skills.
The only drawback from doing our in home preschool is that sometimes Finley gets a little silly with me. He is a pretty smart kid and when something is too easy for him or he starts getting bored, he will begin to answer wrong or incorrectly on purpose just to be funny. That is usually my clue to stop or move onto something different. It can be frustrating at times, but you can't get mad at this adorable smiling face.
