Our First Week of Home Preschool

It amazes me how quickly Kaylyn is catching onto her whole "ABC School", as she calls it. She really loves it! Every morning, its one of the first things she talks about after dropping off her older sister at the bus stop. Each morning we begin with singing a song about the seven days of the week, of which she has caught on. She now sings it and puts the days in the right order!

We follow that with her ABCmouse.com learning path lesson. I try to limit one lesson per day but she loves it so much that I have let her work ahead a little bit. After her computer lesson, we read whatever the Book of the Week is, as outlined by the ABCJesusLovesMe.com curriculum. I am pretty much following that, with a few alterations and with a few things from the LetterOfTheWeek.com curriculum to supplement it. None of the curriculums seemed solid enough on their own, but together, it just made more sense to me.

My full curriculum lesson plans can be found on the calendar HERE.  For more information on each lesson, just click the link. I will try to put as much info including resources as I can. If you have any questions, do not hesitate to ask!

Some of the things we will be covering in this homeschooling type program are:

• recognition of all of the letters of the week, both uppercase and lowercase
• traditional nursery rhymes and fingerplays
• reading of popular, age appropriate and classic stories
• review of colors (she already knows them) and shapes (she knows the majority of them)
• early mathematical skills such as spatial concepts, sorting, and patterns, and understanding simple comparisons
• recognition of numbers 0 to 15, maybe even to 20
• pre-writing skills such as how to properly hold a pencil and how to write her first name, and tracing a variety of lines which will help develop control for writing
• fine motor and gross motor skills through play such as cutting with scissors, gluing, simple tumbling, etc.
• early science which primarily consist of sensory play and learning about different environments through ABCmouse.com, recognizing a variety of domestic and wild animals and their sounds
• self care such as good health principles, learning to dress oneself, and basic safety, manners and helping around the house with basic, age appropriate chores
• social studies consist of familiarizing her of her immediate surroundings such as names of different family members, common foods, things around the house

Here are a few photos from our very first week:

Learning to Write Using the Laufer Method

I think I might have come up with the best way to teach children how to write on notebook paper neatly and correctly. I call it the Laufer Method. I have seen kids writing on notebook paper and most of their letters are all over the place, not neat and tidy, even if they do form the letters themselves perfectly.

Step 1: The top line is purple, the middle dotted line is orange and the bottom is light blue. By the time children are able to be taught how to write, they already know their colors. Having three distinctive colors helps teachers and parents be able to show them a clear difference in the top, middle, and bottom of where letters start and stop.

Step 2: The middle dotted line fades to yellow. This is to help those who still need it to guide them to form their letters correctly while having it less obvious for those who are progressing to writing without the middle dotted line so prominent.

Step 3: The middle dotted line disappears completely and children should now be able to have an idea where it would be, to properly form their letters. The top line turns from purple to dark blue, transitioning children to what typical lined notebook paper looks like while still helping them distinguish the top line from the bottom.

Step 4: The top line turns from dark blue to light blue, identical to the bottom line. This is to give children a feel of what regular lined notebook paper looks like.

Step 5: Children can now begin working on regular lined notebook paper. They learn that the bottom blue line works as the top line for the following line while writing.

This method should result in much neater penmanship using notebook paper, the type of paper preferred in schools and is the universal type of writing paper.

My colors didn't really come through as clearly as I wanted in this picture, but you get the hint.