Preschool at Home (PAH)

We started "Preschool at Home" this past week and it went really well. For various reasons we decided to not send Jack to preschool this year, but since he went last year he has been very concerned that doing preschool at home wouldn't meet up to his expectations. I worked hard to prepare things so the time was structured, efficient and held activities that were appealing to my busy four year old. We did include Ethan, who is two years old, as much as we could but saved the more detailed things to do while he was napping.

My approach for doing preschool at home (which I will now just refer to as PAH) is topical learning with hands on learning and lots of action and play. The great thing about doing PAH or homeschooling in general is that you can adapt and cater to YOUR child's needs. I know Jack is a busy kid and requires hands on to stay interested and needs lots of active time because he is an active kid! We will be doing two days a week, for about four hours each day. We will go on lots of fun field trips to the library, the backyard, the Montshire Museum and maybe even the police station or fire station.

We started our first topic of "bugs" this week. Other topics I hope to cover are the human body, the solar system, under the sea, and all about construction. The topics are things that Jack is interested in and we will cover a different aspect of the topic each day. I expect that our bugs topic will be six days long, so since we are doing two days a week it will take us three weeks to complete.

Although I do not have formal training in teaching, I do have years of experience from teaching Sunday School and Children's Church and of course just from being a parent since our kids learn the most from us whether we set out to teach them or not. I am grateful for all the on-line preschool resources which will make this much easier for me to prepare since I am finding that the preparation is the hardest and most exhausting part.

I am excited about this adventure and looking forward to seeing Jack grow and learn, and mature as the school year goes on. Before I know it he will be heading off to kindergarten so I am treasuring this last year at home with him. I will try to post as much as I can about PAH so you can share this experience with us! For those of you with teaching or homeschooling experience I would love to hear your advice, suggestions or encouragement, I'm gonna need it!

Here is my silly boy, he took this picture of himself with my camera. What a goon.