Planning for preschool ~

There is a lot of homeschool planning going on in The Little White House School.  While planning the year for our four school-aged children, I always try to remember my preschoolers and plan for them too. 

Originally, my thoughts were to write my own curriculum for my preschool aged son.  Let’s just say, I must not have been thinking clearly when I decided to do that.  Summers are mighty busy around here and there is definitely little time for curriculum writing. 

As I thought on it some more, I realized that we would have four school-aged children this year…one getting ready for high school (!) and one learning how to read.  I know my stress levels and so I’ve decided that for this year, our preschool lessons are going to look like this:

 

• We’re going to keep it simple.

No more late nights copying tons of activities from the internet.  This mom needs sleep.  Sleep makes for a happy mom and happy kids.  But our Baby Boy will still have fun and educational activities…just not so many. 

• Only one planned educational activity a day.

Sometimes I plan (way too) many activities and end up with large messes and an even larger headache.  Baby Boy and I will do one main activity a day.  Add to that some singing, some reading, some playing, and some listening during his siblings’ lessons, some nature study…I believe that there will be a lot of learning for our little man. 

Instead of planning all new activities, I’ve decided to just look back over what I did for Sunshine Girl when she was three.  My blog holds most of the activities and many, many links that will keep me from reinventing the wheel.  Here are all of the preschool posts that I’ve written.  And here are the posts pertaining to learning the ABC’s.  There are more ideas here on our very short-lived homeschooling blog.  (See the bottom of this post for links to many sites with preschool learning activities.)

So how will Little Man stay busy while I work with the older children?

 

• We will have planned extra activities for Little Man to work on during the school hours.

We keep plastic shoe boxes of activities on our preschool shelves.  These activities are only used during school hours.   Some of the things in our preschool boxes are:

• playdough and cookie cutters, plastic knives, and rolling pins
• beans or rice, a kitchen scale, and things to scoop with and into
• pipe cleaners and larger beads ( and as with the beans, please watch for choking hazards)
• dot paint markers and printables found online
• scissors and things to cut (Kumon has a great book for practicing cutting skills)
• large pompons, glue, and paper
• plastic dinosaurs and playdough (He likes to build mountains for the dinosaurs.  Sometimes he will drive trucks over his mountains.)
• large building blocks

This summer, I have also joined a group of  twenty moms of preschoolers from our homeschool group.  We are each making an activity but we are making 20 of our activity.  At the end of the month, we will meet to swap out our activities and will come home with 20 different activities for our preschoolers!  How cool is that!

We are using the book Preschool Activities in a Bag for our activities.  You can learn more about the book and swaps if you follow that link.  If you might want to do this with a group of friends, be sure to hurry.  The book is not being reprinted and they are selling the last few copies of it.   (There is more than preschool stuff there too if you are looking for some learning activities.) 

*Where do I get some of the ideas for our learning activities?  Check out these places:

1+1+1=1 

Delightful Learning

Hubbard’s Cupboard

Making Learning Fun

Confessions of a Homeschooler 

No Time for Flashcards

Walking by the Way

Totally Tots

ABC and 123

Homeschool Creations

Do you have any places that you like to visit for preschool activities and printables?