Letters from Pemberley

We haven’t really stopped creating an atmosphere of learning this summer, but I thought we should do an official first day photo shoot again.

We’re still doing preschool at home this year, my inclinations bolstered by reading almost all of School Can Wait.  Things have changed a bit since we started doing official preschool type stuff last year.  We’re still very much play-based and driven by Tommy’s interests.  We’re still doing Bible memorization, working through Mark chapter 1 right now.  We took a long break on phonics because Tommy loved learning the sounds but was not ready to start putting them together when we got to that point in the winter.  So I just started us up again this summer and was shocked to discover that he is able to read tons of short vowel sound words.  I had sworn I wasn’t going to start handwriting until his fine motor skills developed, but he has become obsessed with writing and copying down words and phrases from all sorts of sources–toys, DVDs, books, magazines–so we’ve realized that we need to focus on making his letters the right way so he doesn’t develop bad habits.  I’ll probably need to look into some early Charlotte Mason copywork ideas, as that’s what he is essentially doing on his own, but for now, we’re just perfecting his name and some derivatives from that.  With that addition, and longer Bible passages, I’ve been cutting back on French because I want to keep us under 20-30 minutes total.  We’re just doing some fun vocab.  Because he’s obsessed with the numbers on the racecars in the Cars movie, he likes doing math worksheets like connect-the-dots and tracing the numerals.  He’s begging me to teach him how to tell time, so that might happen this year.  When we have extra time together, we’ll still do geography map puzzles and are learning the order of the US Presidents, along with some fun fact about each.  (Martin Van Buren is hard to remember until I remind him that our 8th president spoke Dutch like our little friend Tim, and John Tyler is unremarkable except that he had 15 children–“15, Mommy!”)  Recently, I found that another homeschooling mom had created a bunch of activity packets to go with the Before Five in a Row preschool curriculum.  We love the children’s books therein, so we’ll likely be doing some of those on days that Tommy wants to cut and glue.  I’m trying to let him do art projects most days during the girls’ afternoon naps, but for right now, they’re out of his head.

And as a side-note, one of my friends recently commented that I have such a structured, put-together preschool plan, and sheesh, it sounded intense!  Although Tommy begs me to “do school” every day, we don’t.  According to my planner from last year, we’ve only done 80 official days of school in the past year–on average, less than twice a week.  All the cool things that we’ve done (and I mean all) have been shared on the blog.  So if you haven’t seen any cool, inspirational preschool activities here in a month, it’s because we haven’t done any.  Just don’t want to give the impression that we are more intense that we actually are.  Derek and I are aware that we’re two firstborns with grand ideals, and we’re consciously holding ourselves back while trying to let Tommy’s interests dictate how much we do academically.  I felt a ton of pressure this spring from friends and family who either opposed early academics at all or wanted me to stick Tommy in a preschool, and I felt really reassured talking to Jen this summer because she has Addy stretching into another year of 2nd grade while Gabe has caught on so fast that he’s doing all 1st grade work this year.  She encouraged me that knowing your child’s unique interests and abilities is more important to developing a love of learning than any educational philosophy!