Letters from Pemberley

I’ve waited a bit to blog about this since we might change our minds, but I think we’re settled on what we’re doing for preschool this year.

A few explanatory notes.  First, many veteran homeschool moms have encouraged me not to overdo it in the early years.  I figure if we keep it fun and easy going, Tommy will continue to beg me to do school as he has for the past three months!  Because I’m such a believer in the classical model of introducing concepts as the student is intellectually ready for them, I don’t want to rush Tommy through the grammar stage too quickly.  Since we have a couple weekly morning commitments, that means we’re probably only home in the morning three or four days a week to do school.  So when I do lesson plans, I’m not tied to finishing things on a certain date; I just plan a day’s worth of activities for whenever we get up to them.  Tommy, like most kids, has already shown a great capacity to memorize.  So memorization, not written work, is our focus this year.  Also, we have found that our kids really thrive in routine, so we usually do our schoolwork in the same order (and ideally after breakfast) each day. 

Our foundation, of course, is Bible memorization.  Right now, on the recommendation of several friends, we’re going through My ABC Bible Verses.  We love it, though the verses are in NKJV, so I had to go through at the beginning and write out the ESV in the margins.  We learn a new verse about every three days, which means one or two a week, depending on how many days we do school. 

For phonics, we started with a simple wooden alphabet puzzle and worked on lower-case letter recognition this summer.  Since then, we’ve been working through The Ordinary Parent’s Guide to Teaching Readingby my homeschool hero, Jessie Wise.  I’d gotten a couple recommendations for phonics curriculums, but this book was available at the library, so I thought I’d give it a try before buying it.  Well, Tommy and I love it.  It’s very basic–just learning a letter a day to chants.  Tommy loves going through and chanting the consonant rhyme: “B stands for /b/ in /b/, /b/, bat.  C stands for /k/ in /k/, /k/, cat.  etc”  Wise points out that all the extra computer games/bright pictures/educational toys actually distract the child from what is essentially basic memorization work.  And Tommy does not get bored by her simple, black-and-white textbook.  Also, Wise emphasizes that learning to read and learning to write are two totally different skills, and we tend to wait on the reading until kids can do the writing.  Tommy’s not ready for writing, so most phonics program that teach the two synonymously are not helpful to us.  Right now, five minutes of phonics chants a day is completely appropriate for Tommy’s developmental level.  He might be reading basic readers before he starts a formal writing program, and I’m fine with that.

For French we’re going through French for Little Boys, which is a really fun workbook that seems aimed towards preschool boys who can’t really write yet but love bugs, cars, robots, and trains.  The focus is on basic vocab memorization and a few fun phrases.  (Tommy can ask me how I’m feeling today and tell me he’s so-so.)  They have simple lessons with a few words in a theme, then five days worth of activities to reinforce the words.  Since they’re all for things Tommy loves, anyway, we can also practice them when we’re playing throughout the day.  We’ll probably continue to just build French vocabulary for a few more years before we worry about grammar.

While those are the three subjects I lesson plan for, I also leave room in my planner for math activities as they come up (whenever we get inspired to do a math art project or work on patterns–he can’t write numbers yet, so it has to be pretty basic) and for geography, by which I mean going through our world map puzzles.  We love maps because we have so many friends spread out all over the country and the world, and we talk about them as we put together the puzzles.  We don’t do those every day–just on the mornings when we have extra time (like today, when rain cancelled our plans).  I also thought it would be fun to write down all the books we read in a day just so we can look back and see what we were obsessed with at a given time.  I keep forgetting to do that after lunch, though.

So here’s what this week’s page in my planner looks like.  (I tried to at least go over today’s activities in pen because I don’t think the pencil shows up well…sorry!)

Okay, fellow homeschooling moms–I’d love to hear about your plans for the year!