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One of the reasons that I moved to working part-time was so I could be home with Jonathan…
Josh and I would like to homeschool him because we have some concerns that he'll get lost in a public school classroom. He's very smart (ok, I'm biased, but still…) and we don't want to see him get bored and start goofing off and then have long-term issues with school. Now that I'm home, we decided to jump right in. A friend recommended a curriculum and I did a lot of reading and research.
So, how do you “homeschool” a 3 year old? Well, here's what we decided to do:
We're using Sonlight P3/4 Parent Guide as the basis of our “curriculum”. Basically, this is just a book list with some suggested activities. There are classic stories plus newer books to introduce science and social studies concepts. It is meant to be done over the course of a year, but I knew that wouldn't be fast enough for Jonathan. I created a 12 week schedule. We're now almost through Week 3, so with a couple of breaks, we're on track to finish by the end of the summer. Now, this doesn't mean we only read the stories once – we regularly go back and read favorites at bedtime. To go along with the stories, I've found additional activities, coloring sheet, and such.
We wanted to do more based on Jonathan's leading, so we modified and added several things to this curriculum.
First, rather than read a Bible story a day, we decided to focus on the story from Sunday School and then memory verse for the week. We do this at breakfast every morning. Each morning looks a little different. By the end of the week, we talk more about the story rather than reading it again. But, every more and multiple times throughout the day, we review the memory verse and previously memorized verses. This has been great memorization for me and for Josh too!
He's been showing an interest in learning to read. He knows his letters and sounds. We made flash cards of common words with pictures to help him start learning some sight words. He has a couple of Leap Frog DVDs that he loves to watch – one is about putting letters into words and the other is about putting words into sentences for stories. Both of these things seem to really be helping. In the past week or so, he's been showing less interest in reading with exception of the videos. We've backed off and are following his cues as to when to move forward again.
Third, Jonathan has been asking to practice writing letters. I found some printable tracing sheets online, but I wanted something more formal to keep him from slipping into bad habit with writing. We're slowly going through Handwriting without Tear Pre-K workbook.
We have a dry-erase calendar on the door to the “office” bedroom. Each day we talk about months, days of the week, today, counting, and ABC's. We marked today's date on the calendar and talk about any upcoming holidays and events.
We integrate counting and other math concepts into everyday activities and chores. Jonathan puts the silverware away when it is clean and loves to sort and count everything as he goes along. I have the Saxon Math K curriculum and we might slowly start that in the Fall since he already has a grasp on early concepts in that math curriculum.
We regularly go to the library to check-out new books. We tried preschool story time, but the monkey puppet scared Jonathan so much that he doesn't want to go back. Union County has a preschool lending library called the Smart Start Resource Center. For a very small yearly fee, you can check out things from books to art supplies, math manipulatives to dress up clothes. We joined there and had a blast the other day looking at everything that we could check out.
Of course, there is lots of playing outside, trains and cars, movies, meeting up with friends, outings to Chick-fil-A to play, lunches with Daddy, painting, drawing, coloring, and more.
There you have it. That is how we're “homeschooling” a 3 year old.
