Curriculum 2011/12

Smiley ~ Preschool/Pre-K:

Smiley has shown increasing interest in academic activities over the past year and particularly enjoys science and reading. I wanted to give our days a little bit more structure and have therefore decided to order curricula... When we start our school year in September, Smiley will only be 3.5 years old, so at a preschool age. His interests are more at a Pre-K level though, so I will call next year a Preschool/Pre-K hybrid, which we will likely continue until he turns 5 in January, 2013 and we can "officially" start Kindergarten.

Here are our choices for the next school year:

History, Science, World Cultures, Bible, Language Arts:


SONLIGHT P4/5: The spine of our curriculum next year will be Sonlight. I have heard such wonderful things about this curriculum and cannot wait to get started. Sonlight is a literature-based curriculum, which seems to be the perfect fit for Smiley, who LOVES to be read to.

FIAR: I also bought Volume 1 of Five In A Row, another literature-based curriculum, using picture books. We will likely add in FIAR units every once in a while, to supplement our curriculum, particularly if we decide to stretch this year over 18 months.

We will be supplementing with our own science units and monthly themes, largely based on Smiley's interests, the season, and holidays. We will also try to go on regular field trips to make our learning as meaningful as possible.

Reading:
We will use different resources for reading that are either free or that I have purchased in the past. I prefer a phonics approach to reading and our curriculum is therefore largely phonics based, with the addition of sight words (helper words).

Hooked On Phonics (HOP): I purchased HOP K-2nd Grade for an excellent price (about $20) a while back. Smiley started Level K a couple of months ago and has done wonderfully with it. It is by far his favorite reading program. He much prefers it over the BOB books.

Bob Books: We have the first set, but as I mentioned, Smiley is not a big fan of them.

ABC Reading Eggs: This is a fun online reading program that Smiley really enjoys. It is a great supplement to HOP, as it slowly introduces word families (phonics) and supplements with sight words as well.

You Can Read: A great FREE reading program by Carisa. We use this program for our sight words and for all the fun learning activities Carisa shares so frequently. We LOVE her blog!

Ready2Read: We love this free reading program from The Moffatt Girls. It combines phonics and sight words.

Writing: 
Handwriting Without Tears: We will be using HWT~ Get Set For School (Pre-K) as our writing curriculum.

In addition to HWT we will do many fine motor activities, including sensory bins, cutting, gluing, play dough, beads, etc.

Math: 
Singapore Math: We will be using Singapore Math: Early Bird Math as our math curriculum this year. We will heavily supplement this with lots of hands-on activities. One resource we will use is Jolanthe's Preschool Packs, which we will try to coordinate with our monthly themes.

Art:
We will do lots of arts and crafts coordinating with our monthly theme or our Sonlight/FIAR curricula.

PE:
Smiley is very active and needs lots of time to run around :) We don't have a garden and going to the playground/park is therefore of utmost importance!! We like to go to the park every morning for at least 1-1.5 hours and most days, again in the afternoon. This is also a great time for him to meet his friends, such as during our weekly homeschool playgroup.

More formally, Smiley will start swimming classes and may switch to gymnastics or a ball sport as the weather gets cooler...


Lovebug ~ Tot School

Our little lovebug will turn 2 in September. My main goal for her is to have fun and learn to love learning :)
Her learning activities will be very play-based and child-driven. I am sure she will take part in many of the activities her big brother is doing as well. We will get most of our ideas from Carisa's wonderful Tot School ideas.

Linked to: Tot School, Preschool Corner, Blog Hop

Tot School ~Letter Aa

~Our little Lovebug is currently 21 months old~

LETTER Aa...

Our little lovebug is fascinated whenever her older brother does schoolwork and really wants to participate as well. For that reason, I thought I would give Carisa's fun TOT School Printables a try. She loved them :)

She already sings her ABC's and is very interesting in "reading", so I thought these printables might be fun for her. She loved coloring the apples in the letter Aa.

She is a HUGE fan of dot paint, so this was great for her :)

We talked about different fruit for her vocabulary building...

I put these laminated letters out for her brother to practice tracing; however, he had no interest in this activity. Instead, our little lovebug spent a long time tracing the different letters ;)

DRESS-UP...

She continues to be a huge fan of playing dress up, preferrably with freshly folded clothes ;)

INSECT THEME
We completed our unit study on insects this week with this fun sensory box (rice and insects from an insect toob).

ART/CRAFTS:
We painted a snail with water color...

and then decorated it

Some more dot paint fun with the apples counting game, also from TOT School Printables...

Painting a frame for her brother's sight words...

Learning Toys:

Preschool ~ Butterflies and Snails

BUTTERFLIES...
We completed our study on butterflies this week. Our caterpillars had formed into chrysalis last week...

... and ALL 5 of them transformed into beautiful painted lady butterflies :)

We fed them flowers, which we sprinkled with a bit of sugar water, and orange slices and kept them for a few days.

We wrote and colored in our journal, where we have been keeping track of all the changes our caterpillars went through...

We went to a butterfly pavillion to see even more butterflies (and caterpillars, and eggs, and chrysalis)...

Then it was time to let them go...

To finish up our insect theme, I made the kids a sensory bin with rice and plastic insects (insect toob). They loved it. Rice definitely creates quite a mess though, so it may be a while before we do this again...

SNAILS...

We added a quick unit on snails this week as well. Smiley has been extremely interested in snails lately. We look for them every single morning :) One day this week, I let the kids collect a couple of snails. We made a snail habitat (we filled a plastic bucket with grass and lettuce) and observed the snails for a day. We went to the library and got several non-fiction books on snails...

I printed a snail and the kids painted it with water color.

Once the snails were dry, the kids had fun decorating them...

READING...

We used You Can Read, Unit 2 and Ready2Read, Unit 2 to work on reading this week, in addition to Hooked on Phonics and ABC Reading Eggs.

We focused on the -ig family this week. Using several activities from Ready2Read...

and then read our corresponding -ig book from Hooked on Phonics. Smiley read this book a couple of times and then re-read books 1 and 2 (-at and -ag).

Smiley really enjoys hands-on activities, so I am trying to incorporate fun, hands-on work whenever I can. We used these fun ice cream cones from Ready2Read. I used a file folder with velcro, so Smiley could mix it up and create different ice cream cones for us to "eat.

Smiley loves his cars, so we incorporate them a lot into our reading time :)

The sight words we focused on this week were "can" and "you". I chose to only do two new words this week... We colored our caterpillar words (from Ready2Read).

Sight word search with dot markers from You Can Read... We also used the playdough mats to trace our sight words with playdough (sorry no pictures).

Smiley loved coloring his two sight words with this glittery paint. Rubbing it in with his fingers was great fun! The printables are from Ready2Read as well...