Preschool- At Home!

With much excitement, we have taken the plunge into homeschooling! Mekonen turns 4 at the end of the year and we started preschool this year. We have lots of reasons we are choosing to homeschool, but that's another post for another day.

So here's a glimpse into what we are doing, and a pic of one very excited 3 year old. 

Mekonen loves books and has been asking constantly "what do all these words say mom?" Or when I give him a stack of books to look at it, he says with disappointment, "But I don't know what the words say!" So I decided to take full advantage of his interest and begin a phonics program with him. He already knows all his upper and lowercase letters so I figure he's ready to start. When I taught before we had kids, I found the Abeka phonics program to be one of the best ways to teach reading and knew we would be using that. So for his first year of preschool we are doing Abeka K4 phonics and then a bunch of lapbooks and some learning games I made from this great website. I mixed some of the toddler and preschool packs for what Mekonen needs to work on. We will also continue reading our way through  Charlotte Mason's reading lists and the classical reading list for early childhood.

This kid is loving all the school attention. It's the first thing he wants to do when he wakes up in the morning. Wouldn't it be nice if that enthusiasm stuck over the years? haha. 

 Learning the vowels and their sounds. 

Mekonen thinks it's super cool that he uses a sword as his school pointer. 

 Learning phonics requires lots of repitition so I've made several games for Mekonen that we use to practice the phonics sounds and letters. He absolutely loves it. Here's one where I made several roads that we can arrange in different ways and when he answers something correct he gets to move his car along the track. 

 Another game for phonics based on Thomas the tank engine. It's so simple, but he thinks it's great. 

We do our phonics and letter work first (the Abeka curriculum), and then we move on to lapbooks. I took several days and made these books up based on Mekonen's interests and we work on bits and pieces of them each time. They work on skills like patterns, colors, numbers, shapes, writing, etc. These are great because we can use them over and over again, so making them was not wasted time or effort!

Here he is working on his Cars book. It's his favorite!! 

Tracing with his Cars book. We need some major work in the fine motor skills department. :) hehe. 

Working on numbers! He puts the right amount of cars on each number. 

We don't have an official schoolroom so I just use this portable white board. Mekonen loves putting his stuff on it at the end of our school time. 

Our school time only lasts about 30 minutes, and Evie's job is carpet time! She has to stay on the carpet and play so she's not getting into all the stuff we're trying to do. Eventually I might make her some of the toddler busy bags floating around online, but I haven't had time. For now, she's content just playing here. 

Some pics of our labooks for the fall. 

Cars

 Thomas the Tank Engine

 Finding Nemo

 A Fall theme

 Knights and Castles 

 Pirates 

So that's about it for now!
Another favorite part of Mekonen's preschool time is putting a sticker on his "I Did School Today" chart. It's the little things...hehe. :)