Triplett Preschool

  J is doing preschool this year!  I have put together many resources as he is learning one letter per week starting with the vowels. We are so blessed by this day and age to have unlimited resources at our finger tips, and many of them are free!  I am having more fun than I imagined with the Letter of the Week. Every homeschool looks a little different so I'm going to share our version of Preschool. Here's how we do it!

# 1. The bones of my curriculum is Ordinary Parents Guide to Teaching Reading by Jessie Wise and Sara Buffington. For K3, my goal is to do the first 26 lessons and stretch out one lesson per week. Each Monday, I make a new flashcard and we learn a little poem. For example, A's poem would be " A is the first letter will say /a/ is the short letter sound of A."  We then review and finish the lesson during the week.                                                          

I store my flashcards in a little case that I found at Staples. 

#2. I also use large alphabet flashcards from Abeka. J loves these because each one features an animal with a cute name and story on the back. I keep it up by his desk for the week and we review it and read a little more of the story each day.

# 3. I have him work on my computer independently with headphones while I am working with L. We  use educational websites like Easy Peasy, Starfall and PBS.kids. He only has access to a kid browser under our family login that has a password. I am amazed at how well he can navigate the computer at age 3.

#4. He does Letter of the Week hands-on activities. This is my favorite part of preschool because it's fun and besides learning the letters he is also learning math skills like numbers, colors, shapes,  patterns, and grouping . I found my materials by mixing  and matching curriculum from some of my favorite blogs like confessionsofahomeschooler.com and  1plus1plus1equals1.com. There are probably many others but those are the main two that I use along with whatever I can find on Pinterest. 

We practice the alphabet often and he uses a Daily Learning Notebook too!



A is for apple! Here he is putting the apples in size order and you can see his dot page in the background.

He LOVES using dot markers. 

Here he is using the dot page and making the letter O out of o's. ( cheerios) This is great for his fine motor skills. 

   

I know he is upside down here, but I wanted to show the page he is doing. He is practicing his colors with octopuses. 

Here he is using his fine motor skills by cutting and pasting the octopuses. The sheet says " O is for Octopus"  and he did his best tracing the sentence. 

I also have so many activity books from Walmart, Target and even the Dollar Tree that I use. My goal was to have everything printed, laminated, cut, filed and ready to use before school started but that did not happen. A was the only letter that I had prepared. I just stay about two weeks ahead now and so far so good. At least it will be done when E is ready to use it. I have about 10-15 activities per letter and I store them in a letter size portable file tote. ( I had to look at it to know what it was called.) Each week, I take all the activities and put them in weekly folders so they are ready to grab and use. At the end of the week, I file them back in  the tote. 

# 5. I also reserve books from our local library to go with the letter of the week. He loved reading about igloos and iguanas last week, but I think Izzy Iquana was his favorite. We probably read this book 50 times. 

#  6. Lastly, we do hands on experiments, crafts and projects that go with each letter. This works great because I can usually incorporate a phonics sound that L is working on. E does everything with us too! 

We made apple trees with our hand and foot prints. Poor E screamed when I tried to paint her feet, so no apple tree for her. 

Can you guess who's is who's?? 

Practicing  the letter E with shaving cream

                                                   We made Italian Cream Soda's

                                                                       YUM!

 
We also discovered the fastest way to melt ice by rescuing insects from ice! We tried salt, water and saltwater.

We concluded that the fastest way to rescue the insects was by throwing the ice on the road and breaking it! 

YAY!! He's free! 

We practiced the letter O by making ocean boxes. 

J is a joy to teach and we are having a blast at Triplett Preschool!  My goal is not to have him reading by age 4 but to instill a love for reading and a love for learning.

Oh, and for all of you who are thinking that I am an ignorant slob for saying octopuses and not octopi... watch this!  Haha!