Preschool Post - Getting Started

When I started out on my educational journey years ago, I never in a million years would have imagined that I would be planning my own at-home lessons for my rambunctious, strong-willed two year old little boy.  As it turns out, my little boy is a smart cookie who needs a lot of extra stimulation to keep his mind busy (more on his gifted diagnosis another day), or my house and my patience really suffer.  Mostly my house, if I can be honest.  I suffered from what a lot of moms suffer from these days - I call it extreme exhaustion, but my son's pediatrician called it  "lazy parenting" (ugh, whatever, obviously she has no clue what it's like...)  It's no one's fault; parenting is hard and simply just not fun sometimes.  It's a lot easier to turn the TV on and scroll mindlessly through Pinterest looking at adorable sensory bins, mason jars (who knew you could do so much?), crafty activities and things you would definitely do if you could just have a plethora of things work out your way including, but not limited to, having your morning coffee in peace, sleeping a solid 8 hours in a row (or even 6, I'm not picky), time to do laundry or heck, even take a shower!  But then reality set in and I realized that if I wait until all of those things actually happen, we will have watched an inappropriate amount of hours of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse and my laundry will still probably not be done.  So, my discovery brings me to present time:

UN-Lazy Parenting  (thanks to an unnamed pediatrician who shamed me into this)

I decided to take my fancy education degrees and put them to good use.  I knew my son was acting out because I was not keeping him busy like I should be, and that was no one's fault but my own.  He needed stimulation and I needed to put my phone down.  I decided to begin researching appropriate lesson plans for gifted preschoolers (or just curious little minds in general) and learned that most of what was considered "interactive" and "appropriate" was actually really, really easy to prepare with a very limited amount of time (and time is always an issue with parents).  In my upcoming posts, I'll detail out my lesson plans, pictures, the materials needed for each lesson, as well as how they actually worked.  I won't recommend a lesson that totally bombed, but I'll let you try it for yourself if you're really curious.  

To get started with these lessons, I recommend you have a small place where you can keep your materials for each lesson in a basket, and a work space that can get messy.  You don't need a whole room, and it doesn't need to be fancy, but it does need to be able to get a little dirty or have a random crayon scribble every now and then.  For me, this space is in my son's playroom.  

Learning Zone at Casa de Smith

 He had a train table for a long time that really wasn't being used, and I had stars in my eyes envisioning all the fun things we could do on that flat surface so, the trains went in a bin on the other side of the room and I turned it into our learning space.  Some children will really need chairs or a small table, but my son really has a difficult time sitting for more than 3-5 minutes, so we do a lot of our lessons on our knees or standing when it's appropriate.  He does have a little Mickey chair he likes if he gets tired, but we move around a lot. I made a quick trip to Target for some colorful bins, a white board and came across some adorable letter and number banners (Dollar Spot at Target, they are still there as of today - 1/13/16!) that I knew would work well for our letter and number focus and ta-da! We had a learning space.  It is important to make sure it isn't cluttered with unnecessary stuff, and remains a place they are excited to go to and learn.

Other things you might need just to get started:

• Baskets/bins
• Dry erase markers and a dry erase board
• Construction paper
• Miscellaneous materials that you might already have including letter blocks, crayons, markers, paints, small plastic toys, etc. 
• Age appropriate worksheets (I can provide a link to those if you're interested)
• Bingo daubers (great for young kiddos who don't have the motor skills to grip pencils and write in lines, etc.)
• Glue sticks
• Scissors for little hands AND big hands

For now, I'm going to provide the basis of what I did to get started, as well as the first thematic unit (a whole lesson plan unit on a particular subject, for those of you that aren't teachers) we learned about which was... drum roll please... OCEANS!   

Before I began my unit, I spent about 10 minutes on my local library's website searching for children's books on the theme I was interested in teaching.  I found 8 or 9 books and reserved them for a quick pick-up (my library calls to tell me when my books are ready so I can swing by and grab them without actually spending much time in the library).  I have these books on display as well as in his book box with easy access.  (You will see in the picture above that I have books in the red basket - that is my book basket and I keep it on the table at all times.  We use them a lot when we learn together. However, this particular picture does not show all of the library books I just picked up for this unit; I'll show those in a different post.)

Book basket - but not updated with all of our newest books!
Check back later for a picture of all the books for the Ocean unit.

Once you're all set up and you have your books ready to go, you're ready to teach your little one(s).  Keep in mind that my lessons are geared for a two and a half year old little boy, but can easily be altered to be more or less rigorous for younger/older children.  In my next blog post, I will outline my lesson plans for the whole thematic unit as well as my personal reviews as to how well each lesson went.  I can't wait to share more with you! Subscribe to my blog and you will get updates on each and every thematic unit I post, as well as links to the worksheets, the lesson plans and pictures! Drop any questions you have in the comment box below :)