Our Preschool Curriculum

Well I ordered my books for our preschool curriculum for Jacob. We will be using Heart of Dakota's Little Hands to Heaven.


When Mrs. Austin wrote the Little Hands to Heaven manual she used a devotional book called Playtime Devotions . It's now out of print but Mrs. Austin has substituted it with another great book called Big Thoughts for Little People. I decided to buy Playtime Devotions because of Jacob's age. He will just turn 3 on April 12. I wanted a very easy intro to school things and Playtime Devotions looked like it was just what I was looking for. I want to instill a love for learning in him and make some wonderful memories with him. I looked at Big Thoughts extensively and I think that when he's just a bit older I will get that book and use it at night before bed. Big Thoughts is a very good book and I was torn because I didn't want to miss out on it either. Little Hands to Heaven also uses A Child's First Bible. In Little Hands to Heaven each unit has a theme centered around Bible characters. These stories provide the focus for the day's plans. The daily activities are linked to the Bible stories. There are musical selections from The Singing Bible that correspond with each unit. I have no doubt this will be a favorite of Jacob's.

My plans at this time are to do Little Hands to Heaven a couple of times a week because of his age. I plan on taking 2 years to complete it. Jacob has shown signs of being gifted so I might end up doing LHTH every day and have to change my long term plans for him but in the beginning this is the schedule until I see how he does. On the other days I plan to use some Kumon First Step workbooks called Let's Cut Paper!, Let's Fold!, Let's Color!, and Let's Sticker & Paste!.

I am also strongly considering using Mathematical Reasoning: Beginning Prek with Jacob. It's for 3 & 4 year olds and I think this book and maybe even the ones that follow it would dovetail very nicely into Singapore math which we will use when Jacob is older. Singapore is known for it's mental math component so I think these books will be an age appropriate precursor.

When I start will depend on when my books arrive. I will be posting about some of our days and weeks in review also.

I'm also working on a new daily schedule now since I will need to make sure I allow enough time for working with Jacob. I will post my new schedule when I'm done with it.

Building on the Rock World View / Bible Curriculum

I stumbled onto a Biblical World View and Bible Survey curriculum that I like the looks of. It's from Summit Ministries. They have elementary through adult curriculum. They have extensive samples of the curricula to look at so you can get a very good idea of the curriculum. Level 1 was over 90 pages of sample. I've only looked over level 1 so I'm still in the checking it out phase but this looks very good so far. Thanks to Deb for giving an overview of it. Be sure to check out what she has to say about her first week of using it too.

In looking at the sample pages I am very encouraged at the hands on application of the lessons. My very hands on son would enjoy it I am sure. My initial response to this is that I very much want this one for our homeschool. If I do get it I'll let you know how it goes when I start using it.

For now though I just wanted to make people aware that it is out there. I hope you enjoy looking at it as much as I have so far.

School Week in Review

In school this week we learned about Columbus' trip to the West Indies and how hard it was. We are reading Pedro's Journal (Apple Paperbacks) as an extra read aloud for History and Joshua is enjoying it very much. He asks every day if we are going to read it. On day 3 of the unit I read aloud the history readings and Joshua built Columbus' ship and an Indian out of Lego's. Here's a picture of his creations.



One of the history activities was to take a balloon and label index cards with the continents and then place them on the balloon in the proper place.



He also made a map of Columbus' route from Spain to the West Indies.



We also set up our timeline from Drawing From The Past. I want their timeline figures too but can't afford them right now. For now we are using some other figures that I had. We put Creation on our timeline at the beginning (top left) and then put Columbus on at 1492.



We had a great week and we will be doing school next week too. We will take the week of Christmas off but then we will start right back the next week because we are so behind in school.

Merry Christmas!

Catch Up Day in School

Well we did school today but it was a catch up day. We did grammar, talked about rhyming patterns in poetry, and reviewed the character trait persistence. Joshua had to come up with something to do to help him be persistent in honoring Jesus. He chose to try to be obedient with a good attitude all the time as his way of being persistent in honoring Jesus. We didn't get math done but we did get our phonics done. We are using Language Tune Up Kit and he's doing very well with it right now. He does that on the computer and it's mostly independent and then I read the detailed reports about what he did while he worked.

Tomorrow Joshua has tutorial so tonight we will read the first 2 chapters of The Door in the Wall by Marguerite De Angeli. That is his current Book Club reading for tutorial.

Merry Christmas!