Themes

Am I the only one that gets all glassy-eyed thinking about all the educational possibilities that are out there? I mean, just looking through early childhood things you can make yourself crazy trying to do everything that is worthy to do! There are the unit studies and lapbooks over at Home School Share, the Alphabet Path at Serendipity, the Montessori 3-6 albums and excellent Montessori ideas blogged over at My Montessori Journey, abundant craft ideas collected at the Crafty Crow, Five in a Row, and so many blogs and books that I find myself in a perpetual state of idea collecting.

 

I finally got around to reminding myself that I am actually a teacher by trade and that I taught preschool for a few years and I *may* have a slight idea as to how to teach my own son! So after reading all the awesome ideas and filing them away in my brain, I went into planning mode- wrote down the basics, copied pages, sorted, filed, and ended up with our general outline for the year.

 

For My Four-Year-Old

 

We will be having a "letter of the week" theme. Ender knows his letters and sounds, but I wanted to have something to plan our year around that was predictable for my super orderly child. We will start with A and work in order through the alphabet, using different materials to learn how to form the letters (dough, sand tray, alphabet builders, and writing as he is able). I pulled ideas from all over the place, and I'm planning to share our plans as we work through them. We started with letter A this week and because of a little craziness in my work schedule we're taking 2 weeks with letter A instead of one.

 

Even though we're using the framework of the alphabet this year, we have plenty of time to take off in more specific directions when Ender has ideas for projects or we find things that interest us. The alphabet is just a guide, projects can come from anywhere at any time!

 

I plan to include number concepts, though those will be on a more casual basis depending on Ender's interest. We're sticking pretty close to Montessori for our number concepts, and I'll share these as they come along.

 

We're using the Kumon cutting book and the maze books too- Ender loves mazes, so he's on to his second maze book in this series. He's having a lot of fun with starfall.com as well, so he's getting a bit of computer time 2 or 3 days a week.

 

For My Two-Year-Old

 

In addition to our letter of the week, I've planned some toddler themes for Ezra. Ender really likes to help Ezra learn, so we're going to have some play center themes for the two of them to help Ezra build some vocabulary and to just have some fun!

 

For Both Boys

 

My goal is to focus on seasons and holidays- to notice the changes in the trees and plants in our own yard, to watch for signs of the incoming season, to learn a little more about the traditions of our holidays and to notice how life moves with the seasons. This portion is just as much for me as for the boys, but I hope they will have being a bigger part of our seasonal chanes this year.