Starting My Curriculum This Week

[Nickel]

I currently have 1 child, an 11 mnth old and my 3 yr old daughter. So I was thinking of postponing "preschool", but I really want my daughter to get the benefits and don't want to wait. I figure if I pick up more preschoolers they can just jump right in.

This month we are doing back to school, my body, the 5 senses, teachers, letters, numbers, the color red, and apples. So I got my books from the library that I'm really excited about. And I was thinking of doing some apple paintings, incorporating that song head shoulders knees and toes. I love that song. . Reading the books, introducing the calendar. Talking about school, friends, and family. Maybe even making a mini family and friends scrap book using photographs and stickers (everyone loves stickers! )

But I'm not sure what else I want to do. I've never done an actual curriculum before, so I want to do some songs and dance, games, art projects (i love art projects. I have TONS of supplies like scissors, paint, crayons, markers, chalk, charcoal, 3d objects like feathers, sponges, tissue paper, etc).

So I guess what I'm asking, is what are you all doing for September? Any suggestions, and ideas? Games, activities? What does your week usually look like?

Thanks and hope everyone had a safe and fun Labor Day Weekend!!!

[sharlan]

I've been doing an ocean theme for the past two weeks. This week we'll talk about farm animals as we're going to the fair on Fri. I've brought out all of my farm animals and Little People farm. We'll go back and finish my last two weeks of the ocean unit I'm doing next week.

This year, I'm going to start out doing Letter of the Week with Confessions of a Homeschooler, plus a few other printables that I have. In Jan, I'll go back to my A Beka curriculum.

[Countrygal]

We are also starting today!

The first unit is "manners" followed by "Preparing for winter", "apples" and "fall/autumn".

I'm actually starting a week later than I had hoped, but it all worked out better this way due to various issues with my dcfs.

First stop - the library to pick up my books. They've been closed the entire weekend.

[SilverSabre25]

Hey, we start today too! I feel like I have enough of a handle on the kindergarten routine that I can add something else new to our day--and besides, if I don't add a bunch more structure for DCB, he is going to tear down the house or drive me batty, or something.

Our first theme is All About Me (working on names, body parts, identifying letters in name, matching names to faces, drawing self-portraits, learning first and last name and birthday). We'll move from there to Apples, Fall/Harvest, and I don't know what next. I do a combination of my choice and emergent curriculum. I've tried pure emergent before and it just didn't work well with my group.

[E Daycare]

My son is 3 and I have one full time dck plus two part timers. All but one are preschool age (the youngest is 1) but for my sons sake I'm doing preschool every day. I figure the ones whom come part time can pick up where I am at when they come. All parents know I run full preschool here so it's up to them to figure if they want to utilize it or not.

Most don't.

I started last week and make my lesson plans a full month ahead of time. I use education.com(free site with thousands of free worksheets and books to print), pamms house (to get a better weekly theme idea) and teachpreschool.com to get idea for more hands on teaching.

Last week was "Back to school week". We did:
Music and movement: wheels on the bus, pretend to be bus drivers. Perpetual preschool for poems. Movement cards
Color: color and find sheet and yellow (for bus), back to school coloring sheet.
Art: paint a school bus yellow, plexiglas glass paint, sand paint, name sequence gluing, comb painting.
Letters/shapes: shape review, use white boards to practice writing our names
Misc: all about me- make a list of things we like, name recognition game with names on paper plates to try and identify them in a pile and match them up, talk about preschool rules and at the end of the week they got a "welcome to preschool" certificate.

We also do daily circle time that goes over date, weather, month, season, year, today, tomorrow, yesterday and question(s) of the day.

This week is grandparents week (modified).
Music and movement: normal songs we usually sing, movement cards, instruments. Practice rolling the ball to random friends in a circle.
Special activity: practice dressing up like mommy and daddy using adult clothes in drama center
Science: talk about grandparents. What do you call them. Make a list of their special qualities.
Math: introduce #1 flash card, #1 on chalk board and counting bears, 1 tracing.
Letters/shapes: letter A, A flash card, A identify, A trace. Make a list of words that start with A.
Art: paint a picture of grandparents, draw a picture of your family on a house (per-drawn house worksheet), 1cent penny crayon rubbings.

Next week is Apple week and the start of letter B, circles,#2, painting circles with Legos and so on.

My goal is to get them as ready as I can. Next year we should be moving and I'll have to close (a,good move tho, closer to family and away from southern OH heat) so I want these kiddos to go to their next daycare and have them where the other kids are and beyond. I want the daycare to be like "what so and so knows their stuff!".

[Nickel]

Wow! Tons of great ideas! Thank you!!! I think I might do the first unit as apples, and I say this because we can use the apples to make name tags, hand print apples and other things that can lead into the about me and 5 senses that we are also doing this month. This way we can also have the apples up all month long. If I can just find a way to attach them to the ceiling without falling off or poking a hole. I have popcorn ceilings, sigh.

A quick question. What are movement cards? What do you do with those?

I got a cd full of kids music, I am finishing up my calendar today (my dck don't start again until tomorrow, so I thought I'd just spend the day with dd having fun). I got green and red apples and construction paper and am getting ink to print out some printables. And I got some great ideas from the homeschool website (thank you for suggesting it) and from 123child.com

Any other suggestions on how a typical week looks? Do you do certain things on one day and other things on another day? I don't want to do too much or too little on one particuluar day!!!

Thanks again

[E Daycare]

Movement cards are flash cards I found that have animals on them with their corresponding "movements". The duck is shown waddling. So weekly I pick 3 cards and I encourage them to mimick the animal movements during music. Get them up and moving instead of just clanging on instruments. At circle time each week I introduce the movement cards for the week and the kids know where they can find them on the music shelf. You could do this with any type of animal flash card I'm sure. I had issues with some kids just sitting all of music. Where I don't force them to participate I did want them to get up and move. Especially on days we are coupled up. We pretend to be silly moving animals and almost all of them participate. With the exception of one.

I bought a lesson plan book and marked down what I wanted to do each week and figure if things overlap then that's fine. I'll make up any work throughout the week. Sometimes my son wants to do this or that (for instance we did glitter explosion one day for science : baking soda and glitter in the bottom of a thin flower vase. Add vinegar and it "explodes" up and out of the vase) so I make time for them to choose. Glitter explosion (or sprinkles explosion as we tried various things to see what would shoot out) has been the biggest hit. That and spaghetti paint/cut.

I always ask "is there something you would like to do today?". We are always so busy doing preschool I do forget they need to hone their scissor skills or how to hold a pencil and just smush stuff with play dough.

Days I have just my son and a dck I take more time. We work on things the kids as really having issues with. I'm thankful to do a lot of one on one time as I only have 4-5 kids (less on some days all on others) but its hard to do one on one completely in a setting with 5 kids (especially with an active toddler now).

This year, since most of my kids are 3 or are turning 3 I've put more effort into the preschool part and even plan on having the 1yr old participate more with them. They are all at different developmental stages and if I include everyone all at once I'm hoping they will help each other.