I have decided to focus on a mostly Charlotte Mason approach to homeschooling, though I am not a purist by any means. Still, calling myself ecclectic doesn't do much in the way of helping me organize and plan the curriculum, so since CM resonates with me the most right now, that is my starting point. CM doesn't advocate for prematurely early academics, so it took a bit of reading up on various approaches to preschool to come up with some concrete things we can do. To be honest, what I'm currently taking from the CM method is Art Study, Music Study, Nature Study, and an unschooling approach to habit training (in that it's not "on the curriculum" but in the back of my mind). Since Natalia does show an interest in reading and counting, I've started with some preliminary academics without pushing it, just to see how it goes for now.
Here is the line up for this week, what was planned, and how it was received.
LANGUAGE ARTS
My goal for Natalka is to continue to nourish her love of books and reading, continue to expose her to a wide vocabulary in all three languages, and to give her more practice with writing utensils in preparation for pre-writing practice starting in January.
Writing - the plan was to have a different pre-writing activity every day. The first day was tracing the shape of our letters of the week in a tiny sand box (really corn meal and some other fine grains that were left over from the kitchen). But that ended up being a much better sensory activity than pre-writing activity. Attempting to connect the dots on the chalkboard reminded me that this is a bit premature for Natalka. Instead, we will be focusing on fine motor skills and manipulation of various writing utensils without worrying about what it "should" look like. We will revisit pre-writing in January.
Narration - I hoped to start a Narration book for Natalka where I ask her to tell me about some experience, and I write down verbatim what she says. This is a pre-writing activity in that she can see her own words being written down to be read later, and with time, narration will turn into her own writing, after a time of dictation. However, as soon as she sees me trying to write, she wants to do her own writing and not talk at all. We'll revisit this in January.
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| Reading Nook |
Essentially, it worked better to read aloud during free play instead of during meals, as we actually have other things planned for mealtimes that became more of our focus. I am counting anything that has a consistent rhyme to it as poetry. Both the children's Bible I'm reading from and the majority of poem books I have are in Polish. Perhaps next year I can try to incorporate English poetry. Spanish poetry will be the most tricky to find, as most of the books I'm finding in Spanish are mere translations from the English, poetry or otherwise.
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| Polish Bible for kids, book on colors |
Book rotation continues. Every week, I swap out her books from her book rack, potty stack, and church bag, so that she is never overwhelmed with choices and always has something different to catch her interest. I'm keeping out her children's Bible, a Montessori Letter Work book (with lower case letters), and an I Spy Little Letters book (with capital letters), which we reference together on Monday with the letter of the week. We also look for the letter of the week in her blocks, puzzle, on the alphabet chart, and then we point and sing the alphabet song together daily. This is looking like a great exercise for Natalka, as she is finding "capital B" and "lower case b" without even being prompted.
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| Letter and number books we use to locate our letter/number of the week |
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| current counting books |
My goal for Natalka is basically that by her 3rd birthday, she would recognize and name basic shapes and colors and rote count in all three of her languages 1-10 (she counts up to 20 right now, but I want to focus on consistency, no skipping, and all three languages before counting too high when she doesn't yet have the correlation of those numbers to real world objects). I'm not really worried about her recognizing the numerals just yet because that is too abstract still.
In her book rack, I've decided to keep out the books on "math" (mostly counting), a Montessori Number Work book, and an I Spy Little Numbers book, so we can reference the number of the week together. I also have a Colors book by Scholastic, A First Discovery Book that we'll keep up until we master colors.
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| window decals teach shapes, colors, word recognition |
Today I also marked her letters, number, and shape into her cheese on her sandwich, which she really seemed to enjoy finding, so I'll try to incorporate that into a meal every week. We got some really cool window decals that help her review her shapes, and rather than focusing on one shape at a time, she just reviews all of them whenever the mood strikes. She does this with her shapes flashcards as well, which include little shape cutouts I made for her to match. We do have a flashcard up for the week on the refrigerator for the letter, number, shape, and color of the week, and she stops by there to review on her own as well.
SCIENCE
Nature Study - If our climate cooperated, we could go on daily nature walks and observe the real deal. But since that is rarely the case, I'm trying to find ways to still keep it real (versus virtual) but indoors. A trip to the Pet Store, observing clouds (a bit of a flop for us this week), bird watching (no one wants to move into our awesome bird house, maybe when we finally hang up our bird feeder...), etc.
FOREIGN LANGUAGE
ASL - We are watching one 30 minute episode of Signing Time per week, the whole thing Monday, and then 10 minute increments the rest of the days to try to keep Natalka's interest. I am not counting Polish or Spanish as a "foreign" language for her, as these are native to her just like English. Plus, I'm benefiting from learning more signs.
CRAFT
This has been tricky, as I'm not very crafty. But I'm trying to bring something from one of the other areas of study into a craft. This week, we used cotton balls to "paint" clouds on some paper, and we also glued some cotton balls down and then painted them. She did not love this, so we moved on to playdough designs.
SENSORY ACTIVITY
This week we had two. One was the mini sandbox with fine grain for the kitchen, which she enjoyed for a couple days before I had to confiscate it as she started going crazy making a mess. Obviously, we need to reevaluate where sensory play will take place, because I do not want to limit her. We moved today's sensory to the craft room downstairs, as it has a tarp on the floor. Today we tore paper and put it into a container with water, and then we stuck the wet paper onto a metal chair, the container, each other. We are leaving the paper in the water and will check on it later. Hopefully all the ink will come off and we can then read her Magic Schoolbus book that discusses this process of paper recycling. When finished, we will compost the paper.
MUSIC APPRECIATION
This week we listened to Bach for Babies during meals, but since we had started this last week, I was getting tired of it, so midweek we switched to some classical music on organ. She likes turning the music on, as well as swinging her head to her favorite parts. The goal is to prepare a different composer for each week, and just listen, perhaps trying to make out which instruments she can hear.
The goal for now is just exposure and appreciation. Eventually, we will want to recognize the composer and pick out which instruments we hear, and later be able to compare composers by musical features we hear.
Natalka now has a musical instrument corner set up with the following instruments at her disposal whenever she likes: keyboard, guitar, gong, xylophone, flute, triangles, harmonica, maracas, castanets, chimes, and "drumsticks" (though the makeshift drums, two different sized tin cans, are kept separate in the closet to minimize noise pollution on mama's ears!). I also decided to keep the one book she has on instruments in the basket with the smaller instruments. It's a coloring/counting/Spanish book, so a little bit of everything. She knows how to turn on the keyboard by herself, but it is tricky to turn it back on if it is silent for a while, so that's something we're working on.
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| musical corner |
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| instruments found in the musical corner |
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| Musical book that doubles as a.... |
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| ...Spanish counting and coloring book. |
We of course sing the alphabet song pointing to our alphabet chart, and we try to sing "In the Morning (Give me Jesus)" every morning before getting out of bed. I'll need to incorporate more songs into our repertoir, as I hear her humming and singing to herself during play, and she's gotten a couple complements on her keeping melody.
ART APPRECIATION
Every week we will focus on a different artist, and each day we are studying one of their works during meals. This week is Boticelli, and we have studied "The Birth of Venus" (her favorite), "Primavera", "The Adoration of the Magi" (too busy and I found it creepy), "Fortitude", and one she picked out from seeing small icons on the computer when I was bringing up the others: "Mars and Venus". Monday after studying "The Birth of Venus", later in the day she asked me to recreate the piece on her dry erase board! Of course it wasn't up to par, so she erased the most offending part and said that wasn't right. I asked if she wanted to go look at it again and she ran to the computer! Then she had me try to draw it on paper. I was amazed how much interest this generated. The other paintings have not been anywhere near as exciting for her.
The goal for now is simply exposure and appreciation. Eventually, we hope to be able to recognize by artist and title the various works we study, and later, pick up on nuances of a painting to guess the artist or compare artists.
SOCIALIZATION
So I have finally determined what this means to our family and how we ought to go about it. I struggled for a while in trying to figure out the ideal number of playdates per week that I should be setting up, only to finally realize that the point is not mere peer exposure. The point of socialization is to learn how to get along with others, learn what's approrpriate behavior, how to share, how to take turns, what the standards of politeness are in our society, etc. None of these things can be learned from fellow students of socialization, ie. her peers. I've noticed that she is very observant of the behaviors of others, and if we don't monitor what she is exposed to, she will begin to copy undesireable behaviors. So I ditched the idea of trying to organize X number of playdates. Instead, I'm focusing on exposing her to different situations with different people of any and all ages.
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| for some reason the air that comes out of the vents is fascinating |
Yesterday, she had an actual playdate with two younger friends who came over for several hours. She fell asleep on her own watching her dinosaurs movie, and slept for 14 hours! (Granted, she did wake up for a potty break and needed to be talked back down to sleep, since we are night-weaning again after three of her molars messed up our previous success.) Also this week, she joined me and her dad at my midwife appointment, went with us to the pet store to look at the animals and go in with our dog Bigos for her vet appointment, and I'm pretty sure we hit a few stores at some point as well. I'm drained from all the socializing, so I'm planning a playdate at a library class for next week, with a store run earlier in the week, and that's it for next week.
I think what Charlotte Mason and Maria Montessori would call habits training falls under this category. We are focusing on manners, being helpful, and independence. Help with cooking and chores likewise falls under this category.
PHYSICAL FITNESS
This is probably more for me than for her, since she runs around all day, but I have on the schedule a daily yoga session, walk, dancing, or (if I'm not feeling like participating) an obstacle course set up downstairs that includes a tunnel, a balancing board, parallel bars her daddy made for her, a hula hoop, and a coupe car.
So I'm quite pleased with our first week of Preschool, and I'm glad to be getting my feet wet long before any accountability is required. I will try to add a few photos soon to help illustrate what we're up to.
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