The Preschool Homeschool

If you’d like a chance to win a $10 Walmart gift card, visit my Cooking Kids Blog and enter your favorite kid-friendly christmas cookie recipe. On a side note, if you have a blog, letting your kids help you run a contest is a great learning experience. The kids and I ran a no-bake cookie contest earlier this year and the kids really enjoyed helping and learning about no-bake cookies and the judging process. In the beginning they were both willing to pick the first cookie they liked as the winner, but after seeing how the judging process worked, they were excited for each new recipe.

If you’re not big on cooking, you can run a story contest, poem contest, joke contest or any other topic you and your family would like judging. If you have a homeschooling blog, you could run a most creative homeschooling project contest or something along those lines. Good luck!

One of my favorite websites for preschool homeschooling, The Best Kids Book Site, has a craft blog. I subscribed a week before last and absolutely love getting a useable craft sent to my email box twice a week. It’s called Craft of the Day, and you can subscribe to the RSS Feed and have the ideas sent straight to your email box. They are sending out Thanksgiving craft ideas right now, and all the one’s I’ve gotten have been easy to do and use common supplies. I hate when I check out a craft site, only to realize that most of the supplies used I don’t have on hand. The craft for today is a simple turkey made with heart feathers. All you need is construction paper, scissors, glue and imagination. I hope you enjoy getting these crafts as much as I do.

Craft of the Day

I stumbled across a free downloadable zip file while searching for some Thanksgiving Day activities for me and my daughter to work on this next week. We have already made turkeys from our handprints and did a turkey coloring sheet, but I wanted something we could work on that we will actually use on Thanksgiving. This zip file has a variety of different graphics that you can use in all different ways. I used my editing software to print out the turkeys in a circle with four on a page, and we’re going to color them and use them as coasters for Thanksgiving dinner. I hope you enjoy this free Thanksgiving resource. Find the free zip file HERE.

If one of your homeschooling goals for this month is to teach your preschooler a Thanksgiving Day blessing, try teaching them the one below. This blessing is sung to the tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,” which make it easy to memorize. I’ll be posting more Thanksgiving activities over the next few days. Unfortunately, my daughter dropped and broke my camera, so I can’t include any pictures. But I’ll do my best to convey interesting activities and recipes.

Thanksgiving Blessing

Let’s be thankful for this day

For our friends and for our play

Let’s be thankful, let’s be glad

For the food and things we have

Let’s give thanks for you and me

And our home and family

If you’ve been homeschooling a while, you’re probably already familiar with the Starfall website. If not, here are some tips for integrating the Starfall site into your curriculum.

First, you need to visit Starfall and browse around and see all the fun stuff available. We use Starfall whenever we start a new letter. We work on the letter and then go online and she does the letter on the Starfall program. She loves all the music and interaction that Starfall provides. The best part is that it’s all free. If you have a printer, and if you’re a homeschooler you need a printer, there are plenty of free homeschool printable activities that correspond with the site.

Just visit the download center for alphabet pages, printable books, make a word papers and bunches more. If you plan a weekly curriculum, jump on starfall the night you plan and just print out your activities for the week. It’s also great to use Starfall as a filler activity. For example, if you feel like you’ve achieved nothing one day because the fridge busted, toilet overflowed, your cell phone fell in the dog’s water bowl, etc…let your kid spend some time playing on Starfall. No matter what they do, they are learning something, and the site is easily navigated by little hands. My daughter needs no help whatsoever navigating to different activities. Enjoy!

One great thing about homeschooling is that you don’t have to worry about doctor’s notes and school excuses for absences when your child gets sick. However, if you’re anything like me, you do worry about an illness totally putting you behind in your homeschooling plan. While we are generally laid-back homeschoolers, I do worry when illness makes everything come to a complete stop.

I can honestly say that we haven’t done a darn thing for the past two weeks. It all started with complaints of sore throats, which turned into coughs and sleepless nights. Once that was over, my daughter, who is the preschooler, got pink eye. So we spent one day at the Dr.’s and pharmacy and the next two days applying eye ointment that makes it really difficult to concentrate when your eye feels goopy and gross.

That was finally cured this last weekend and I thought we could get back on track. But what happens Tuesday morning? The return of the Pink Eye Princess and this time it went after Mama! So now both of us have pink eye, and we’re derailed before we can technically even get back on the track. But then I remember that there’s no rush and to just enjoy this time of hanging out and complaining to each other that we can’t see out of one eye very well. So when illness derails your homeschooling, just enjoy the good times.

As a homeschooling family, we occasionally try out affordable curriculums and see how we like them. We used Brighter Visions with our son and tried it with our daughter. Our son was 2.5 when we started with him and our daughter was 3.5. Even after trying Brighter Visions with two different age groups my opinion remains the same.

With Brighter Visions you get a workbook, craft, stickers, storybook, and manipulative or song. While it’s fun for the kids to get these little boxes in the mail each month, it’s not a curriculum that keeps their attention long. My son and daughter both enjoyed the crafts and stickers the most. My daughter can do the workbook in one day and my son was never interested.

I stayed with Brighter Visions for about 4 months with my son, until I realized I could come up with the same things on my own or find similar projects online for free. I only got 2 boxes with my daughter. However, if you struggle each month to come up with a learning theme or ideas, then Brighter Visions may work for you. The cost is certainly affordable. The hardback books that come in the box are worth the price. At around $20, the price can’t be beat. However, if you’re looking for something truly enriching for your curriculum, you may want to try something else. You can decide for yourself by ordering a free sample curriculum from BrighterVisions.com. They do honor the guarantee that you own nothing if you don’t like the product.

We have a work-in-progress going on in our dining room. One of our projects is creating a fun alphabet wall. Right now we have the letters A-F up on the wall. Each time we start a new letter, I print out a copy of it from Here, color it in and tape it up on the wall. It looks like this:

The next couple of weeks we are going to be adding to the alphabet wall to make it more interactive and fun. For each letter we are going to add a coloring sheet or craft that corresponds with each letter. For example, A will have an apple, B will have a ball, C will have cookies and so forth. Since she is 3, my focus right now is learning the names and sounds of each letter. I meet a lot of parents who tell me their child knows the alphabet. Many times these kids know the ABC song and letter recognition but don’t know the sounds of the letters. To me, knowing the alphabet means knowing the name and the sound. We do practice writing, but it’s not a main focus right now. We’ll focus more on writing next year. I’ll post an updated picture of our alphabet wall when it’s complete.

The reason I don’t create the coloring sheet/craft when we are learning the letter is because I use the alphabet wall decorations as a letter review. I don’t rush any lessons. I like to know that when we’re done she really knows it and doesn’t just have a picture or the placement on the wall memorized. If your preschooler is struggling with learning the letters and letter sounds, try creating an alphabet wall somewhere in your house. Like I said, ours is in our dining room. Another idea is to use sticky velcro pieces to stick the decorations on the wall, and create the decorations from felt. This way you have an interactive alphabet with moveable pieces.