Creating a Pre-School Curriculum
To teach pre-school children
Pre-school age children can be so much fun to teach because they’re so excited to learn new things and are so ready for you to teach them. It’s the perfect age to get them on the right road to gaining knowledge as well as keeping them enthusiastic about learning.
If you’ve decided to homeschool your children of this age, it couldn’t be a better time to begin. However, it’s up to you to make it exciting and keep it that way so that your little ones will look forward to each day of “school.”
Which day to choose for classes?
To begin with, decide which days you’ll want to have classes for your children. Since they’re so young, you may want to keep it down to Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, or you can do half days Monday through Friday. After all, they ARE children and should be given plenty of time to play and have fun.
Once you’ve decided what days you want to hold a class for your children, choose the hours that you’ll be teaching them. They should get up around the same time every morning and enjoy a good healthy breakfast. That’s the number one rule when it comes to starting your day. Breakfast will keep your children full of energy throughout the morning.
Following breakfast, choose an activity that will gently warm them up for the rest of their day. It can be through a coloring exercise of some sort to teach colors and shapes. If they’re brand new to all of this, they’ll probably enjoy thinking that they’re just getting to play with crayons. Try the color of the day in the beginning. For example, red can be used in also teaching about apples and fire engines. Incorporate things that your children see and use daily so that it will make more sense to them.
An enjoyable activity is through the use of photo albums or scrapbooks in which you’ll cut out pictures from magazines that correspond to the color you’re teaching. Using red as an example again, you can find photos of bright and shiny red apples, fire trucks, cherries, strawberries, and whatever else you can come up with that is red and relevant to your children. You can create a book of this kind for each primary color. Spend a little while after breakfast each morning with one of these books. Engage the children in learning what each object is.
Since they’ve been sitting for a while, following the book activity, get them on their feet doing some stretches. You can use this as music time and teach them songs. If you’ve got your music CDs, put those on. DVDs that teach songs are even better. You’re trying to keep them interested and excited and music almost always does that.
Work in a mid-morning snack followed by what learning activities seem to suit your children best. After lunch, they can have rest or nap time. If you’re doing full days, this time would be followed by a fun learning activity. When children are this young, you need to let them be your guide as to when to introduce what sort of activity. That ensures that they’ll learn what you’re teaching.