Preparing For Preschool

We’re pretty laid back in the early years. Most of my children’s education in the early years comes in the form of us just answering their questions. Because children are full of great questions.

We don’t have a school room, so school stuff is all over the house. I have little areas in the dining area that we put what we’re using this year. The rest is in boxes in the garage. I really like having everything we’re using handy. It also helps me not to over buy.

I went ahead and printed up all the pages I’m going to use from LOTW for each letter. Then Phoebe put all the pages for 2 letters in each folder. Now I don’t have to remember to print things up each day or each week.

Esther is very interested in letters. She often says, “How do you spell D?” When we answer, “D”  she gets very frustrated. And then she repeats her question. So I repeat my answer. Which, of course, leads to more frustration. I realized recently that she means “How do you make D?”  So I’ve decided to use Confession of a Homeschooler’s Letter of the Week program. I’m not doing all of it. Some of it is too advanced for Esther and some of it she already knows. I’ll just use it for ideas for a letter each week.

I also printed up 5 copies of each level for the Ready Writer and put them in a folder.

I also have some Handwriting Without Tears stuff that I want to begin introducing. Again, there’s too much busy work here for us but I really, really like the consistent terminology they use…and I already have it. I’ll just use this as part of our letter of the week.

I have some Ready Writer worksheets that I’ve printed up for her to do. My older children did these and enjoyed them.

This is the book shelf that is at one end of our table. The bottom shelf holds some games that we play often. The next shelf is for Esther’s “school” stuff. And the basket on the 3rd shelf holds her glue, markers, crayons, and misc. art stuff.

Esther can count to 5 pretty consistently so we’ll just continue counting random things like apples at the grocery store, books on the shelf, etc. No need to buy special counters to learn to count.

Benjamin, Phoebe and I are going to work our way through The Little House on the Prairie book series and I found a couple “My First Little House” books for her. And we’ll also continue to read random picture books before naps each day.

So other than that her time will be filled with play do, Legos, potato heads, marble mazes and hanging out with the rest of us.

I have absolutely no academic expectations for her. If we get to the end of the year and she can still only count to 5 and doesn’t know any more letters I’m totally okay with that.

So, what do you do during the preschool years?

Thanks for sharing with your friends!