Friday, August 10, 2012

First Week of Homeschool Preschool

This was our first week of official homeschool preschool.  It went as well as I could hope.  Lydia seems ready so far for all the resources I chose for her, which was my biggest fear.  I'm finding that I am really enjoying teaching her.

Math:
We started Singapore Essentials A a few weeks ago because I wanted to.  It's the only resource we started early, but Lydia loves it.  We do several pages most days and I usually have to cut her off.  So far she's done really well except with the same/different concept.  I'm pretty sure that is mostly a language issue, though, not a concept issue.  I will definitely keep working on it though.  She completely through page 60.  The other issue is that she is mostly not ready to start writing yet, so as a result, we are doing a lot of it orally.

Reading:
Since Lydia has known her letters and sounds since before her 2nd birthday, we skipped that part of Ordinary Parent's Guide and started with basic blending.  Yesterday, Lydia read her first word "at," and today she moved onto her first 3-letter words, "cat," "sat," and "bat."  We completed through Lesson 28.  She seemed very proud of herself as we did the lesson with her upside down on the couch because she was too hyper to sit still.

The first day I tried it, I used the book and she whined and was not interested at all.  So the next day we did reading, I got out the magnet letters and a cookie sheet and after pre-reading the lesson, taught it without the book.  This went over WAY better and I think I'll just keep doing that.

Read-Alouds:
I decided that the general theme I will have for this year's read-alouds is fairytales, myths, and legends.  It's not rigid, but it gives me a starting point.  To start off, we are reading the D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths.  We got through the creation story, the battle of the Titans, and we learned about Olympus.  We also read several picture books that the girls enjoy, and we continue to do family scripture study every evening, which mostly consists of reading The Book of Mormon out loud to the girls.

Memorization/Calendar Time:
Every day, we talked about the month, day, season, and year.  We also talked about the days of the week and listed them.  Afterwards, we worked on our first memorization selection, the 1st Article of Faith.  I think Lydia will have it memorized by the end of next week, plus or minus a few days.

ETA:  I was wrong!  She already has it memorized.  I took a video of her saying it all by herself (not very clearly and slowly, but it is there.)



Miscellaneous:
Lydia got through page 14 of Rod and Staff's About Three preschool workbook.  It is mostly a pre-writing, preschool skills book and she enjoys it.

That was our school week.  We enjoyed it very much and I'm excited to teach my little girl more!

2 comments:

  1. Good job Mom! Oh, enjoy it...I miss those days!

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  2. Sounds like a great first week!

    When my son did OPGTR I used magnetic letters a lot. I also took the time to type some of the lessons into a word document and then printed it in larger font. This helped him learn to read the words left to right and track across the page without being distracted by all the extra typing on the OPGTR pages.

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