Awhile back (a long while back!) I wrote about the resources we use. It's been awhile, so that list really isn't current. I sort of touched on what we'd be doing for kindergarten here, but it was a very basic overview. I thought it would be fun to share our basic routine on school days, which are, theoretically, any week day that Peyton is working (it works better to have his off days as "adventure days").
Anyway, I split the day into four parts:
Morning
After the kids have their breakfast and watch their shows, I take my bath and get ready for the day while they play independently. I usually play with them for a few minutes and then we go right into our morning school time. This includes:
- reading a devotion. We are reading Good News for Little People right now and we love it. It's all stories from the gospels and it's easy and engaging without being too simplistic.
- practicing the catechism. Annie is doing great with this. Graves is starting to pick up a few things, too, which is really encouraging.
- calendar time. I skip this more than I should. The kids love it and obviously it helps with a lot of concepts.
I do all this in their room and Graves is present (physically, he checks out and plays a good bit, which is fine with me) for all of it. It takes twenty to thirty minutes.
Afternoon
This is what I do with Annie when Graves naps (or has rest time if he refuses to nap). It's usually the hardest to execute because I'm selfish and want that time to myself. But I've found that I can actually get a LOT packed into thirty or forty five minutes without Annie's little sidekick. During this time, I try to:
- Do her Logic of English lesson. This is the bulk of our afternoon school time. It includes learning the sounds the phonograms make, writing letters, and now reading short words. There's usually a specific skill to practice (identifying a sound at the end of a word for example), a little game, a workbook page or two, a page to practice letter writing, and a few new words that I either dictate and have Annie write (long and tedious) or write myself and have her read (we fly through those). As I said, it actually goes pretty quickly. She struggles with writing, but reading seems to be a strength.
- More read aloud. I read to Annie from a chapter book. Right now we're reading an American Girl book and she seems to be enjoying it. It's special to have a little time to read something that probably wouldn't interest Graves and is well above his level.
- Annie also has this Brain Quest workbook she likes to work through. It's not the most impressive thing, but there's really nothing wrong with it. One great thing is that it's really the first thing I've gotten her to work on independently. I read her the directions on a page and she can usually complete it without my help. It's mostly review for her, but I think it's helped her confidence and she really enjoys it.
All of this together takes about forty five minutes to an hour.
Evening
I know most people are DONE with a school day at five o'clock. Obviously. But Graves still takes a nap and I'm a night person. So it makes sense to me to fit in something edifying between his nap and supper time. Here's what happens then:
- We read our Five in a Row book. I want to do a post about this curriculum and blog about it more deeply, but the premise is that you read the same children's book every day for a week. The curriculum consists of a good many children's books and a teacher's guide that contains basic lessons that extend over a lot of disciplines. It shows how to integrate math, social studies, science lessons into what your are reading. Some of the books also make connections with geography, art, culture, and foreign languages. This is basically our science/social studies/humanities course right now =)
- We do Graves's critical thinking. This is the book we use for him right now. Sometimes we do two pages, sometimes we do six. I let his attention span guide that right now. Again, I'm okay with that right now.
- Some days we do an activity for Graves from Slow and Steady. I wrote a full post about it here. It's basically just great developmental activities to guide and assess your preschooler.
This takes anywhere from half an hour to an hour.
Late Night
Haha, I know I'm going to lose people at this point. It's really hardly anything, but I do consider it the the closing to our school day. -
- More read aloud. I am really pretty passionate about reading aloud if you can't tell. We have two read aloud books, almost always from the library. This is another way I try to integrate science and social studies. When Annie learns a new letter, we'll typically pick an animal and one other thing to "research" (for example, with "b" we might learn about bears and berries). Anyway, I pick one of those and also one from a stack of library books I've checked out specifically for Graves.
We like to get a big haul sometimes!
- We read our Bible story.
I try to spend at least twenty minutes reading to them before bed.
So that's our school day for those who are interested. It might not work for everyone to split it up so much, but I enjoy it a lot more that way and I think for the age of children I have it's been really successful.
We also, of course, try to add in more reading throughout the day We have memberships at the American Museum of Natural History, The Met, and also the Children's Museum in Brooklyn so we try to take "field trips" when Peyton is off. One other thing I do is try to incorporate fun activities to go with the phonogram we're learning. I'll post more about that soon!
One other thing to note, I used to try to do lesson plans for a week. It worked for awhile and then I got to where I dreaded it. I know at some point that will be necessary, but right now I just plan during that time in the morning when they are playing independently!
No comments:
Post a Comment