August 24, 2009

Homeschool Preschool

Generally I do believe that unschooling works.  I love reading unschooling blogs and any info I can find.  I also feel that there is no need for preschool... however I have decided to do a very informal "preschool" with Pookie.  Now that September is just around the corner we can get back to having a more scheduled week.  

So here is my plan (mostly inspired by www.letteroftheweek.com):

Each week I will make a poster board with a letter, colour or shape and a theme.  This week I chose the letter A, the colour green and alligators.  I got some alligator books out of the library - both children's fiction and a couple of children's reference books.  I have printed some letter A colouring pages and I printed a picture with all sorts of green objects.  

So my plan is to point out the colour green whenever I can, dress her in green and give her some green things to eat.  I also thought we could do a green photoshoot a la "Chasing Cheerios".

We have read some of the alligator books, and my next thing is for us to go on a 'gator scavenger hunt to find all the ones we have in our house.  "Alligator Pie" will also be our song/ poem of choice for the week.

I have a few letter games we will do (if she is interested), and I will let her do the letter A on starfall.

Also each week I am hoping to come up with a gross motor skill, fine motor and montessori inspired activity.   I have a one-to-one correspondence activity for her this week.   I am also going to offer the scissors daily this week, and I got her a $2 golf club and ball to play with.

All of this is meant to be fun.  It gives us something to do and hopefully DD will enjoy her "school".   I am also hoping it will make it easier if we were to actually HS... but that is a whole other topic!

I am going to keep a notebook and try to fill it out each day and make note of what we did in each "subject" area.   Already I noticed a change in how I think when Pooks and I interact.  For example today she was eating some raisin and I would give her 1, 2 or 3 at a time and ask her how many their were.  She really enjoyed counting them and eating them up.  DH and I are also back to 'hugging for the count of 10'.  We especially love this one because we get an extra long hug out of her!!