School at Home

I am not a homeschooler, nor will I be. Pk goes to a wonderful home daycare and I truly believe that it is a good place for her. While I know that there are some great institutional daycare settings out there (I know that Kittenpie's daughter goes to an exceptional one), in my experience, that is not the norm. We wanted Pk to be somewhere with a focus on social relationships and nurturing and we truly believe that it what we have gotten.

On the flip side, our minor concern was whether she might not get quite the same academic preparation for school. I will say, it is a minor concern - we are both elementary teachers and early years specialists so we are fairly confident that we could pick up the slack. She goes to two wonderful music classes with a language component, we are devotees of the local library and Pk is getting lots of great life experiences. I am not a parent who has my child on the fast track to MENSA (sorry, seen too many "gifted" kids out there - as my husband has repeatedly said, he would rather his daughter be "stupid but happy" - yes, that's my politically correct man!). I'd like her to be bright enough that school isn't a struggle but I don't need more than that and I certainly don't define her value by her i.q. or her reading score.

Anyway, I read about the book below on someone's blog at some point and decided to give it a try. I LOVE this book. Pk and I have found so many great activities and the author has come up with some really fun, age-appropriate, novel ways to explore important concepts. There is a good balance of fine motor and gross motor activities and not a worksheet in sight. If you are ever at my house, you must ask Pk about "the bag game" and see her reaction!

I just thought I would share an activity that we started on Thursday that has become the new favourite. The idea is to teach several concepts - left to right, the downward sweep back to the left when reading, colour concepts (green=go, red = stop) and counting. Pk adores this. You get an egg carton (ours our plastic which makes it a bit harder to see) and label the left side with green and the right side with red (again, since ours is plastic, instead of marker, I used some old scrapbooking brads). The idea is to get your child to put one item in the top left (we used raisins since Pk adores them right now and they are easy to manage) and to put one in each of the cups, going from left to right. When you hit the red end, you point out that red is for stop and go back to green for go on the next row down, continuing until each cup is filled. Pk's favourite part is to go back and then eat each raisin in the same order. Thursday, we did one is each cup, yesterday, we counted two in each cup. I love this activity and so does she!