I fell off keeping up with a week by week recap of our homeschool preschool adventures using 26 Letters to Heaven. Largely because John starting having huge learning leaps and I just needed to keep up with him.
In the past year we've gone from barely making it through a story (and even then mostly ones he had heard before) -- to being able to do a whole reading hour with mixes of books he had heard before and brand new ones.
His imagination play has exploded.
We've learned that he adores vintage style books with lots of rhymes, repetition, and decent pictures.
We've learned I do not care for books where there are no words. (I am not the author, please don't make me write your book as I go. Thanks.)
He can now cut out pictures along lines, knows his colors, can moderate his glue usage (praise be the Lord!), and complete many art projects solo once he's set up.
He recognizes most letters and can distinguish between upper and lower case.
He can count up to 12 reliably, and can sort objects by various categorizations.
I'm pretty pleased with how this year went.
Therese has just been along for the ride, but she seems to add consonants to her vocabulary as we covered them with John. Little ears pick up many things even when it looks like they're not listening.
So how did 26 Letters to Heaven work out?
I LOVE the booklists! The book is cheap enough that I would recommend it for the booklists alone. Using them made me feel like someone who knew so much about children's literature (I don't) leaving the library with all of these awesome old school kids books.
The activities were pretty hit and miss for us. A lot of that is due to starting this book with a young 3 year old. He certainly aged into it as we went.
I could see a lot of them being great with a 4+ year old, and I probably will steal some of the ideas as supplements as we go along through PK4 and Kindergarten.
I ended up using a lot of Pinterest ideas in the end. I just searched for the letter of the week plus preschool activity and dozens of ideas at my fingertips!
This had the benefit of pictures of the end product. John has turned out to be a very visual learner. If I can show him what I am wanting it to look like in the end, he can make it happen.
He found the specific step by step instructions frustrating, and taking them directly from the 26 Letters to Heaven book meant I had to give it to him orally or spend time making an example ahead of time. Nope, not going to happen. Pictures for the win!
Next Year + Summer!
We're moving on from a largely reading/activity based "school" day to one that includes workbooks!
We'll be starting Catholic Heritage Curricula's Preschool curriculum in August.
I do feel that John would benefit from a group learning situation part-time. We're looking into an activity for the school year (probably soccer or ballet) that can provide more physical outlet.
Next week he starts swim lessons! We're putting him through the Red Cross learn to swim program with all three sessions back to back before the kids head to Texas for Grandma time at the lake!
Therese is still along for the ride a bit, but she is starting to pick out her own books at the library and she'll get to participate in a lot of the same activities John is doing.
Starting in PK4 I start doing some fun things on the regular like hatching butterflies and field trips to places like the firehouse.
It's going to be a fun year!
Here's a round up of some of my favorite homeschool posts from this year.
Thanks for the review! I've been thinking about using this for our youngest (3). :)
ReplyDelete