Before Starting:
I'm a planner.Sometimes that's a good thing, but sometimes I need to learn to not get so caught up in the planning. I've spent the summer trying to plan for starting to homeschool preschool this fall. And while planning is a good thing, I think I was trying to over-analyze it.
So here's what I've come up with.
We will start doing preschool using this book:
We'll use Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons every day for the suggested 15-20 minutes. They suggest teaching a lesson every day because the concepts are so new that young children quickly forget them, so that's why I'll go ahead and teach it every day. It's a very interesting curriculum, in that it teaches reading by sounds instead of by letter names. After looking into it and having it recommended to me, it sounds like a good way to introduce reading.
On Monday, Wednesday and Friday, we will be doing Confessions of a Homeschooler curriculum, following the same letter order as in Teaching Your Child to Read. Confessions of a Homeschooler is a lot more than just reading, so I think the two curriculums will complement each other well, but I'm trying to stay flexible and be willing to change things up depending on how Miss Magoo is doing.
Two Weeks In:
So, it turns out it's good that I was planning to try and stay flexible!Things haven't gone exactly as I had planned. There have been days that I was up all night with Baby Girl and just didn't feel like teaching Miss Magoo. So I have to be honest and admit that things haven't gone perfectly and exactly on schedule.
However, I feel like things are going well, and I'm impressed by Miss Magoo's progress.
Miss Magoo has a voracious appetite for learning, which is really awesome! Sometimes it can be rough, since she wants me to teach her all day. And as she learns to count higher and higher, I have to wait while she counts every cheerio in her bowl, despite the fact that we're running late!
She is already counting to 29 very well, she just wants to keep going with 20-10 and 20-11.
The Curriculum:
At first, working with Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons was turning out to not be very easy. Because Miss Magoo already knew the names of all of her letters, she just couldn't understand why I was asking her to stop calling them by name, and instead call them by sounds. Like, why couldn't she say "em" and instead she had to say "mmmm." So that presented a few problems for the first week.There is also a section in some of the lessons about rhyming. Miss Magoo rhymes very well, but the way they do it just isn't clicking for her. They give a sound and something we're rhyming with. The child is supposed to put the two together. For instance, there will be an M on the page, and we're rhyming with "at." So Miss Magoo is supposed to say, "Mmmmat. Mat." For whatever reason, I just can't seem to get her to do it, despite continually modeling the correct way to do it. However, I'm just persevering in the hopes that at some point it will click.
The awesome part is that 12 lessons in, Miss Magoo is reading short words! Today she read am, ram, see, rat, eat, seat, sam, me, and seed with minimal help from me and just a couple corrections.
I'm also thrilled at her writing! While we've taught all of the letters by sight, I've never pushed writing. Each lesson in Teach Your Child to Read ends with writing practice. The first couple days, I was ready to pull my hair out. The writing just wasn't looking anything like what I was showing her, and I felt like the problem was that I wasn't communicating it well. Today was the first day the S started looking like more than scribbling. And the E was really rough, but then at MOPS a last week, she just wrote one. So progress is being made.
As far as Confessions of a Homeschooler, the curriculum is pretty easy. It's more crafts, matching, and easy tasks for Miss Magoo, but she enjoys them, so I use them as rewards for trying hard during Teach Your Child to Read.
Are you using a curriculum for teaching your preschooler? What kind of schedule are you keeping?
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This is strictly personal opinion, but your daughter sounds like one who loves to learn things just for the sake of knowing them. Stating the obvious, I imagine. :) What that can mean though is, she doesn't learn following the usual steps that typical kiddos need to follow to learn something. She sounds like she'll be one of those who just gets things when she's told what "the rules" are. Maybe just sharing some simple phonics rules with her would suit her better. BTW, I tried 100 Easy Lessons with one of my youngers, and found it to be a very unnatural way to teach and it really didn't seem to stick with my son. I know it works for many, but like everything else in this world, that doesn't mean it works for everyone. A couple suggestions I'm trying this year: Alpha-Phonics by Samuel L. Blumenfeld and Harvey Bluedorn has written a book on phonics that I've heard is one of the best (I haven't purchased it yet, but it's on my list). There is also a notebooking activity available from Sarah at All That's Good Publishing, called ABC Kids Do Phonics, that's a fun way to keep track of the rules that are listed in Mr. Bluedorn's book.
ReplyDeleteCongratulations on your new baby girl. Hope you're taking it easy & enjoying the short time with a newborn when no one really worries too much about what is or isn't getting done.
Kari, thank you so much for the ideas! I will have to look in to that!
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