Preschool Prep

Preschool starts this week at our house.  Lots of my "free" has been spent organizing our preschool stuff, planning our weekly themes, and revamping our weekly schedule.

This will be Adalyn's last year of preschool before kindergarten next year and I want to make it a good one.  Part of me feels bad for not letting her have a true preschool experience with a real live teacher and friends.... BUT really I love teaching them and the "stay at home with mommy" years are so short anyways.  Why make them even shorter?  McKay thinks that I should home school until they are 8 years old, but that doesn't feel right for me yet.  So we are planning on sending her to school next year and we will go from there.  :)  Oh and this will be Jensen's first official year joining us, but he still has 3 years till kindergarten.

Last year I tried using someone else's curriculum that I found online and I didn't love it so this year we are doing our own thing.  I came up with themes to go with certain letters.  A is for Apple, etc.  We are not going in order of the alphabet, just doing which letter fits best.  Such as C is for Christmas at Christmas time.  We will change our theme every other week since I already know that I am not ambitious enough to change it every week.  Themes may be slightly tacky, but... just like matching my kids in coordinating clothes I love it!  So we do themes here, but they are probably more for me then them.    

We will try and do "preschool" Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday each week and save Monday and Friday for errands and other fun stuff.  Our focused preschool time will only last for about an hour each day unless we have a big project going on.  My main goal is to keep things simple enough that we actually stick to our plan.  Because the fancier I try to make something the less chance of me actually sticking to it.

As far as set up goes we have an extra coat closet in our house that I have turned into preschool closet.  The closet has 7 main shelves.  Each week I put out 6 educational activities that the kids can choose to work on.  I will be there playing/working with them the whole time.  The 7th shelf is for the books of the week that we will also read together.  My biggest focus is for us to just spend quality time together and learning something new is bonus.  We will also do calendar time, weather, letter of the week stuff, and memorize a scripture as we start each day.  The kids loved the mini circle time stuff last year so all I changed this year was adding in a calendar.  The calendar will be awesome since Adalyn is so curious about time, days, nights, weeks, etc.

The preschool closet is always a work in progress, but here is what it looked like at the end of last school year.
 

Not included in preschool time is music and dance that we usually do after lunch.  The kids love to listen to me sing silly songs or to dance to their favorite Disney songs.

If I get really ambitious at some point throughout the year I hope to have a couple holiday parties with their friends.  Such as a valentines party or Halloween party.  You know, to keep them social.  We also just got a zoo membership so that is a good place to escape to if we all just need a little fresh air, yet we can still feel like they are learning something.  We may even attempt the fire station someday (probably getting ahead of myself on that one) lol

Last year was a good trial run for how we wanted things to flow, but I am excited for this first full year.  I love preschool and watching my kids learn and grow!