home school preschool for the past six months

 

Quarantine has changed my practice a lot, looking at spending more time with my kids, and becoming their preschool teacher.  I am grateful that my 5-year-old has been in two different preschool settings, and I had the privilege of volunteering in both classrooms. So I have a slight idea of what kids might like, but I can't ever pretend to be either of those brilliant teachers.  I can, however, try to bring my own interests and quirks into their learning experience--things a preschool teacher in a classroom with many children might not have the tools or space for.

At first, my husband and I split the teaching duties on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The curriculum is based on the alphabet and whatever topics he or I want to incorporate with our given letter of the day.  Now that he is working part time, I'm basically in charge of the curriculum.

To get things started, (when I remember) we ring a bell to get school in session.  We then do a session of Cosmic Yoga. It's a great length for kids, and sometimes I try to find a theme related to the lesson if I can.  My son had a "run around" room at his last school, and I liked the idea of getting some wiggles out before trying to sit down for any length of time.

After we roll up our mats, we sit on paper name spots put on the ground in front of an easel.  We have started looking a at chart of the alphabet since my three-year-old has not been in school before, and I hoped that if we sang the alphabet song slowly, and pointing at each letter, at the beginning of each class she might start joining us.

On the easel is a big pad of paper with the letter of the day.  We are on our second run through the alphabet since September, so I'm asking my five-year-old to write our new words in red and that way we can compare his penmanship, and what new words we're learning compared to just a few months ago.  I'm not great at getting them to practice beyond this.

Each morning before we start I select stories from our library to coincide with the letters, based upon themes, or just simply ones that start with the letter of the day, depending on how obscure a match I might find. I have those in a pile beside me as we do the alphabet singing, and writing on the pad of paper.

My three-year-old often wanders during different episodes of the school day, so I try to tune into whether she might like what we're doing if I encouraged her attention. Sometimes I can just let her meander to another activity, like looking at a story we're about to read, or playing with a puzzle. 

Many projects include a food from the letter of the day, a recipe, an ingredient, or a cultural culinary experience we might have never explored.  

I thought for a time on this blog I would start to share some of the projects we've been doing over the last six months, hoping they might help with parents who are perhaps running out of ideas.  As I'm an artist, and by no means a teacher, these rely heavily on the hands-on and visual, experiential nature of learning rather than a specific philosophy or studied theory.  

Some of the fun items we have done: 

Natural Dyeing, and a Noctural Animal Hunt with blacklights for "N" day

X-ray chocolate cakes with a stencil of the kid's hands, and Pin-the-tail-on-the-Xingu-River-Ray for "X" Day

Shadow Puppets and Specimen Collection at the Seashore for "S" day

And many more. I'm hoping to make a post for each letter. Stay tuned!