Our Pre-Reception Class Curriculum

Since Nikki is going to be home with me all year, I thought it would be best to make some plans about what we are going to do. Curriculum is quite a strong word for what we will be doing, but 'vague plan with a couple of textbooks' just doesn't sound very professional!

There are four key subjects that I want to cover this year: Maths, English, Russian and Music. I have not made any proper plans for any other subjects, though we will certainly be covering other subjects in an informal way. I want to keep the formal stuff for the mornings and have afternoons free for outdoor play, arts and crafts etc.

So, here's my plan for now:

Maths.

I want to re-start our work with Saxon. I don't know how I really feel about this book, since it goes so painfully slowly and Nikki already knows a lot of the material, but since we can do a lesson in 5 minutes I thought it would be a nice pain-free way of including Maths into our daily routine.

I also have a collection of Montessori materials, board games and other Maths-related activities and hope to play at least one of them every day.

English.

Reading: we haven't really made any progress with reading lately. Reading Eggs got too difficult (not reading-wise, but in terms of computer and coordination skills) and so we didn't pay for a subscription and haven't had much luck progressing beyond CVC words. For this year, I have bought a new book, designed for early readers, called The Reading Lesson. I am impressed with the format (despite American spelling) and it promises a second grade reading level in 20 lessons. The lessons should take around 5-10 minutes and be covered in 1-2 weeks each. So we might even finish it this year if Nikki can get over his fear of reading sentences!

Writing: We have our amazing writing course Write from the Start. I am completely in love with this program because it is completely focused on fine motor control in a fun way. The worksheets take literally a couple of minutes - I swear he takes longer choosing his pen colour than actually doing the work! We will practice letter forms separately (jumping straight into cursive) and I hope to get to the point of writing words this year, too!

Story time: The most time-consuming part of our Language curriculum! I am currently putting together theme packs of 5 books to do a Five in a Row type reading program. The plan is, simply, that I will read the same five books every day for a week and we will talk about the books and find more themes and deeper understanding over the course of the week. I will probably use these books to base our arts and crafts and science experiments on, too.

Russian.

Nikki will be going to Russian school again this year. I also plan to make Russian lessons a part of our daily routine.

Reading and Writing: Use a combination of his school reading textbook and games to learn the letter sound and forms. I want to use last year's textbooks for daily Russian practice. His class is progressing to multi-syllable words this year, which means he might actually be reading fairly well in two languages by the end of the year! (Russian is much easier for learning to read because you just learn 33 letters - no funny rules or letter pairs making completely different sounds, there are only a very few exceptions)

Comprehension: Again, use games and his school language textbook to revise and get the topics into his active vocabulary.

Story time: Same as for English, except the goal is more to encourage understanding and narration than discussing themes, since someone is reluctant to actually speak in Russian.

Music.

This is our final set subject. Nikki is so musical that I really want to make it a daily lesson. We have our Little Musician lessons for theory and Soft Mozart for learning the piano. I have no goals other than to keep him loving music and getting familiar with the sounds of notes and instruments, and maybe learn a couple of musical terms.

Nikki is reluctant with piano lessons - he likes to play as if he's in a band, dancing to the music and pretending to play a tune. Very occasionally I can stop him for about 30 seconds of practicing "proper" playing techniques (finger exercise or note-recognition games). The best I can hope is that he picks up a couple of bars of Jingle Bells in time for Christmas!

The End.

So there's my vague plan / curriculum for this September. My goal is to do lessons in Maths, Reading, Writing, Russian and Music for at least 5 minutes every day. That is maybe half an hour plus story time before lunch - not too much for a nearly-4 year-old, I think. Story time will probably need a maximum time limit to fit everything into the morning, though...

Using our Moveable Alphabet

I put a missing-letter CVC word worksheet in our lesson packets but the text is small and so I had to write in the missing letters for him to be able to read the word - what a perfect point to introduce using our newly-boxed moveable alphabet!

Nikki and I worked through the sheet together, and I still filled in the missing letters for him, but then he got the fun job of finding the letters and making the word all by himself!

He liked to trace the letters with his fingers first, practicing - and explaining out loud - how to write them:

His current phrase of choice is "I really love..." and guess what - he really loved his new box of letters!

Linking up to Montessori Mondays

Reading Eggs Review

We have just finished a 65 day trial of the Reading Eggs program and so I thought I'd write up a little review for you.

We extended the 14 day trial using two codes (UKB24MBT and AU567) I found on the brillkids forum. It is only possible to add two codes to any one account, so this is about the maximum free time you can get, but I thought it worked out as a perfect trial run for us.

To start with, Nikki loved reading eggs. There is a placement test at the beginning so you don't have to repeat stuff you already know, but because Nikki didn't know the sight words we started right at the beginning. This wasn't too bad, he got a lot of phonics review and the letter sounds games were easy for him, but the phonics moves slowly so even at lesson 30 there was nothing new being introduced to someone who knows all the basic letter sounds. 

That said, Mr I-won't-read-sight-words needed to start at the beginning for precisely that reason. The sight word games worked wonders and he began to read simple sentences. Not just sound out CVC words, but actually read. I was very impressed.

The games are great fun and brilliant for encouraging reluctant readers, but we did have some problems. At first, maybe 2 or 3 games in any one lesson would require computer skills Nikki just doesn't have - like catching moving objects on the screen with the mouse. As we used the program his skills improved, but the difficulty of the games did as well. This is a program designed for children at least 2 years older than Nikki and he couldn't keep up.

For example, one game has you catching moving fish with a word written on them, reading the word and  putting the fish into the right box. The text is probably a font size 12 or 14 to fit on the little fish. Probably not too hard for a six year old, but Nikki needed me to do most of it for him.

Also, the text in the reading books at the end of each lesson is quite small and you can't adjust the size of the book on the screen to make the text bigger. This really intimidated Nikki, even when the sentences were 3 words long and he had easily read the same sentences in much bigger font in a previous game.

The end-of-level test after every 10 lessons had even tinier fonts (maybe 10 or 12pt)  and Nikki just refused to do them and guessed the answers. I had to really help him through the test when I knew he was able to progress because he couldn't cope with small fonts.

We got up to lesson 32 and Nikki's reading really progressed, but I could already see the sharp increase in difficulty of both reading and computer skills and I could tell that we had maybe a month before it got too hard and he lost interest altogether. He was already dreading the end-of-lesson book.I have decided not to pay for the program at the moment. This is not because it is bad - I actually really liked it and may well invest in a year or so when his computer skills are a bit better, if he still needs the lessons.

For now, I think I have found another program that I like... 

Lesson Packets

We haven't done much structured learning so far this year. Between perpetual colds, three chest infections and a bout of the 'terrible threes' neither of us has been much in the mood for sitting down learning.

Since starting Russian School, though, Nikki has once more started asking me for lessons. As we haven't done much for a while and I am only now getting over a generously donated cough/cold bug, I didn't want to put too much energy into planning work that he might decide is 'boring' very quickly!

So, I printed out some alphabet/phonics, shapes and maths worksheets from 1+1=1 and filled 26 plastic wallets with them. I then ripped up a couple of colours/shapes/counting workbooks that I have been meaning to use with Nikki for months and stuck a page or two in each wallet. When he asks me for a lesson, I just empty the next wallet and we work through them.

This method is working out so well for us right now! The worksheets are easily finished in 1-2 minutes each and is mostly revision work but it is getting us back into the habit of sit-down work which is great.

Below is an example of one worksheet we have finished - he did it all perfectly but because drawing circles is so fun we had to circle everything else in another colour. He is making a real effort to trace the letters and is really eager to learn, something that I have really missed this winter!

Making Materials: Moveable Alphabet Storage

I bought a cheap set of plastic letters ages ago (I just can't justify the expense for the beautiful wooden Montessori ones) and they have been stuck in a box because I just couldn't figure out how to store them in a way that all the letters would be separate and visible.

So, today I googled and came up with a rather obvious idea using a craft supplies box - just perfect because know that I have a spare one!

Obviously, it was nowhere to be found now that I had a purpose for it. However, whilst searching for it I came across an old display box of watercolour paints that was just the right size. The paints were moved from the plastic holder into our arts and crafts box and the plastic was ripped out to leave an empty box.

To make the dividers, I cut up some card runners to fit the length and width of the box and cut notches to slip them together.
                 
The final grid fits fairly well into the box and keeps the letters separated - so long as the box is kept nice and level. I don't expect the letters will ever look this neatly arranged again, though!

And yes, I measured the spaces to be equal and that means that the m and w letters don't fit in horizontally, so they have to be put in sideways. It was far easier to put a couple of letters in wonky than fiddle about re-sizing the grid to make them fit!