I’m doing it! I have found a free curriculum online for my two year old. I am going to start it Monday! Thankfully, I am not alone. I will have several friends starting it with their 2 year olds as well. Let’s hear it for the babes of 2006 – they are growing up!
The curriculum is very basic and works for me. It seemed overwhelming at first, until I sat down and created a calendar and suddenly it was actually very simple.
You may have heard of the website or the specific curriculum already… It is Brightly Beaming (Preschool Prepatory) by Letter Of The Week and is geared toward 2 – 4 year olds. It is a 26-week plan, with a weekly theme and a specific “subject” each day. There is also a weekly vocabulary word, weekly nursery rhyme, as well as a list of suggested books, poems, and music to coordinate with the weekly theme.
Mondays: Gross motor skills
Tuesdays: Shapes / Colors
Wednesdays: Letter of the day
Thursdays: Number of the day
Fridays: Fine motor skills
This is completely casual – because I couldn’t manage it any other way right now, LOL. If you want to give it a try too, I’d love to have even more company. Feel free to comment, here or on future Preschool At Home posts. I’d love to hear ideas, how it is working for you, what you may be doing with your toddler / preschooler if something different, etc.
You can download a copy of the calendar here: Preschool At Home – September 2008.
The calendar is something I personally created based on the curriculum, just to keep me organized and to keep me from feeling overwhelmed by the mass amounts of info on the site. On Sundays I have the week #, theme, and vocab word and on Saturdays, the name of the weekly nursery rhyme. The other days are as outlined in the lesson plans.
1 September 6th, 2008 at 9:39 am
I did this same thing when Kelsie was 2. It got boring for me so fast. We didn’t end up doing it all the way through. But, I will say that the little we did do she learned a lot from, especially the letter recognition. She just turned 3 and we are fixing to start the Kumon work books along with some other online preK stuff. Good Luck to you! They do grow up so fast!
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2 September 6th, 2008 at 9:43 am
I’m using Letter of the Week, too!! But I’m combining the positively adorable Preparatory Curriculum and the Letter of the Week. I was able to find most of the Cow books at our library - adorable! Have fun.
3 September 6th, 2008 at 9:59 am
Joanna - I’m hoping it doesn’t get boring. This is my first foray into this type of thing, so not sure what to expect. We’ll see how it goes.
Michelle - What is the positively adorable prep curr? I tried googling it with no luck. Thanks! BTW, how are you liking the letter of the week curriculum?
4 September 6th, 2008 at 10:30 am
This is great to know. My little guy is 1 1/2, but I have been thinking about this too. Thank you so much for the great information!!!
5 September 6th, 2008 at 11:01 am
Christy, the link you sent me to, is the preparatory curriculum. I think it’s what we are planning on using.
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6 September 6th, 2008 at 2:49 pm
Thanks Christy! I’ve been working on our curriculum for my almost 3 year old to reinforce what he’s learning at preschool. The site you gave looks great!
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7 September 6th, 2008 at 4:38 pm
I was going to do this, but found it was going to be too confusing. I ended up just doing a letter each week and picking 2-3 things to go with it (Ant, Apple, Alligator) and then picking up some books from the library to go with each topic and looking online for a craft idea to go with each. It was much less overwhelming for me, although I did use that website for ideas.
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8 September 6th, 2008 at 10:28 pm
this is great, thanks for sharing. Check out my blog for an award.
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9 September 6th, 2008 at 10:30 pm
thanks for sharing, I am going to check it out. check out my blog for an award!
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10 September 6th, 2008 at 10:52 pm
Man…if you set up a ning site for this I’d so be on board, because I’ve been looking for something like this for my 2&3 year old girls and I’m so excited!!!!! I’m gonna do it!!!
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11 September 6th, 2008 at 11:23 pm
[...] over at Shake the Salt, Christy has put together this too good to pass up calendar for starting to teach the kids, you [...]
12 September 7th, 2008 at 9:39 am
This is really neat. I wish I had known something about it back when my daughter was this young.
I’d love to find something for after school/weekends for a 3rd grader. Let me know if you ever stumble upon anything like that.
13 September 15th, 2008 at 7:42 pm
Hi I did something like this when my daughter turned 2 now she’s almost 3 1/2 and we are doing a combined pre-k/kindergarten curriculum just based on workbooks from places like Walmart and Kmart and learning toys from Vtech and Leapfrog. You’ll be amazed at how big an impression starting out so small can make on a little one. Congrats and good luck.
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