The Preschool Years

The first formal type of curriculum I tried was when Samuel was 2 ½. I really like the idea of using living books since that’s kind of what I had already been doing, and I discovered Sonlight. I bought most of the books for the Sonlight Preschool curriculum (even though it wasn’t recommended till age 4 or 5), later called Core B, book list. I joined the yahoo group for SL PreK and downloaded “Amy’s Schedule”. Using some of the SL books and some from the library, we did a unit on nutrition from Amy over a few weeks, and then a unit on India of my own design. I found that a structured daily schedule didn’t really work for us, and then we went a few months with nothing official, but I would read some of the books and stories on the SL list for our bedtime reading. I kept doing this pretty much through to his 4th birthday, adding in books I found from other preschool lists and from various preschool yahoo groups.

Cutting and pasting from various lists and curriculums, I made up my own curriculum for what I called K4 and scheduled it by weeks. I felt that learning should just happen naturally, but I wanted ideas for activities and books to read. By the end of the K4, I gave up the idea of even trying to schedule things by weeks. Instead for K5 (“official” Kindergarten), I instead made a master list by subject that I will share on the next post, along with how we are doing.

I’m going to share my preschool curriculum with you, but as I started typing it from my weekly record, it was too long for one post. I’ll post it by subject in future posts.