My first week of homeschooling went swimmingly well, due to all of the pieces being laid out for me via the Preschool Homeschool Blog I stumbled upon when I was looking for ways to get started.
So, here's what we did our first week:
Our theme for the first week of school was COWS. Ryder already knows about cows and points them out all the time, so this was a fun refresher for him. We printed a picture from the internet of cows and posted it to our learning board.
On Monday, I introduced the theme to him, and we colored a farm and cut out some cows and pasted them on the farm, and we went for walks around our area that has cows and visited with some!
The Vocabulary word of the week was CALF: a baby cow.
We looked on the internet for a coloring page of a mama cow and a baby cow and talked about the vocabulary word. We posted the coloring page on the learning board with the word and meaning on it.
We chose a story from the reading list provided by the Brightly Beaming Preschool Curriculum, Two Cool Cows, by Toby Speed. We also went through his bookshelf and pulled out all the books with cows in them. He had fun sitting and looking through them.
Per the curriculum, I should be also sharing a poem with him, (which they also provide for us), but we didn't get around to that part :)
The song we chose to go with week 1's theme was Old MacDonald had a farm! Ryder is so cute when he sings "had a cow". Here is a video of him looking at some books and singing the song.
We are also supposed to practice some gross motor skills on Monday's. For week 1, it was to put on some music, and roam around the house making cow sounds. We didn't get around to this, but that video probably would have been funny!
In this curriculum, we alternate shapes and colors every other week on Tuesday's. So, week 1, we are learning about a shape, and week 2 we will learn about a color, and so forth.
The shape of the week was the SQUARE. We printed out a coloring page from the internet and Ryder colored a square, and we looked for items in the house that were the shape of a square and he played with them.
After that, we reviewed the items that had been placed on the learning board (Theme,Vocabulary word, Read another book from the reading list to do with the theme, sing our song related to the theme, and ending with the Shape we learned).
On Wednesday, I introduced the Letter of the week: A
We printed a coloring page of a large letter A and Ryder colored it.
I found some nifty free printable flashcards and we cut them and added the letter to his learning board. We talked about various things that begin with the letter A, like Apples, and Alligators.
We had fun making the Letter of the Week craft project- An Alligator! Then, we completed a review of everything on our learning board, added the Letter we just learned, and read another book from the reading list to do with the theme.
Thursday, I introduced the Number of the week, which was ONE (1). Again, we printed a coloring page with the number 1 on it, and Ryder had fun coloring it. Again, nifty flash cards were printed and cut. We added the number to his learning board.
We are going to be making some index cards that have the number and the spelling, and then another card that has the number that matches it in stickers. This way, several weeks in, when he has more numbers, we can play a matching game. I will post that project when we get started on it.
With the Number of the week, we go around the house "counting"- or getting items like cheerios or goldfish, etc. and I have Ryder count them out. Another thing we do is take the Shape of the week and draw the corresponding number. I also point the numbers, shapes, letters of the week out to him as we are going about our day in town, or running errands, wherever I see them.
Thursday's for schoolwork are kind of slow due to it being number day and we don't have projects for that (other than the matching game, which is ongoing)- so I decided to add a couple of things to this preschool curriculum.
The two items I have added are the American Sign Language SIGN of the week and a Bible Verse of the week. I already had some flashcards for most common signs for babies/toddlers, and just went through it to find one that went along with the curriculum's theme. This week, we learned the ASL sign for COW.
For the Bible Verses, I found a great site that offered printable flash-cards for Bible Verses that go with the Alphabet. So, I just printed them out, and we are using them in correlation to the already existing Letter of the week. For week one, the "A" Bible Verse was Matthew 7:7 - "Ask and it shall be given to you. Seek and you shall find." Another website I found that had different Bible Verses to memorize with your children is here. Maybe I will do those next year, and then rotate the verses out each year.
Both cards get added to the learning board for the week.
On Friday, I introduced the Rhyme of the week. This curriculum introduces it on Friday, and you continue to repeat it/review it until the next Friday when the new Rhyme is introduced for the new theme. The Rhyme for the COW theme is HEY DIDDLE DIDDLE. We wrote it on an index card and put it on the learning board to review throughout the week.
Friday's are also Fine Motor Skills Day. We were supposed to build a cow out of squares, but we didn't get to this activity.
The rest of Friday's are used as a review day- going over everything on the board that we have learned that week. Here is a picture of our board at the end of the week, along with Ryder's Letter of the week Craft we did. It hangs on his wall in his room. I am pretty proud of the way it turned out and am excited to share with you week two! Stay tuned for the next post!
