Friday, September 21, 2007

Homeschool Preschool


School this year is going so much more smoothly than it did last year. It seems that although I’m a homeschool graduate myself, it’s taken me several years to get in a homeschool groove that fits our family well.


Silas is especially enjoying preschool. I learned a lot from Preschoolers and Peace this year. One of those things was the idea of Circle Time. When we have Circle Time, we are doing preschool, but everyone is included. Sarah (2) is catching bits of this and that, and Elizabeth is my helper. Silas is just having fun learning. They cannot wait each day for Circle Time, especially the little ones.


As I’ve mentioned before, Silas has not been exceptionally eager to learn preschool skills till the past few weeks. This coincided nicely with the start of our school year. He already knew some of his letters, but we’re going systematically through the alphabet, focusing on a letter a week. I got this idea from Tenniel at School@Home, one of the first homeschool blogs I ever read. I’m sure it’s not unique to her, but her simple and straightforward descriptions of exactly how they did their letter of the week definitely inspired me to follow a similar pattern.


During A week we read A books, made glitter A’s, practiced writing A’s, and learned an A hymn. In fact, my goal is to teach the kids a hymn for every letter of the alphabet. (More on that in the next post.) For B week, one of our favorite activities was the “B” book we made. Book starts with B, and we filled our B books with magazine pictures of things that started with B…bumblebees, bicycles, berries, boys, books, boats. What a lot of messy cutting and pasting fun!


This is C week. Monday we talked about the letter C, and then as a special treat we walked to the old-fashioned ice cream parlor around the corner and the kids each got a candy stick. (Candy starts with C, get it?) They have the old-time display of many-flavored candies for just 15 cents. That was a cheap and fun reinforcement.


How many times have I used the word fun in this post? A bunch I think. I have always known God called me to homeschool my children, but I have never been one of those moms that just loves and adores the teaching part of homeschooling. Until this year. While we have our challenges, it’s now a joy!

1 comment:

Hannah's Mom said...

How fun was that, going to the *C*andy store on the *C*orner to get *C*andy sticks... it is a joy isnt it.