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...

Little Artist

Nicholas has suddenly started drawing. Until a couple of weeks ago, his idea of drawing was take a pen(cil) and scribble indiscriminately. Now he is doing proper pictures!

I may have started it by helping him draw his dad and granddad on their Father's day cards by telling him to start with a circle for the head... what about adding arms/legs etc. I only 'helped' by making his lines thicker and darker when he decided that he needed to cover them in orange paint and green glitter...

Granddad                    Daddy

He has since spent less time focused on "writing" and created the occasional work of art - even going so far as to name them!

This whiteboard masterpiece is titled "Surgery" though I am fairly sure he doesn't understand what a surgery is. It is rather Picasso-esque with the person-within-a-face (on the right). Unfortunately, whiteboards are notoriously hard to photograph, so please forgive the reflections.

Today was the biggest progress as far as I am concerned. Completely unprompted, Nikki drew a picture that is quite clearly themed, but also actually looks like what it is meant to be! It is still obviously a preschooler's artwork, but you can quite obviously make out both the man and the car in this picture. It is, I think, his first independent piece of non-abstract art.

If I knew how, I would change the brightness to make the pencil lines stand out better.

Now I feel the need to brush up on my own artistic skills - if I don't progress beyond stick men soon, Nikki will catch me up!

Bedtime Potty Training

Nikki has been dry in the days for around 15 months now, and I have long been finding excuses for putting off the night-training because, really why would I want 3am bedding changes? I have been feeling worse because my nephew has been doing really well and he is the younger cousin (though they were actually due on the same day).

Last week, my sister bought her son a goldfish as reward for 2 months of dry nights. She managed where hours of discussion and feeble bribery had failed - Nikki is now a big boy and doesn't wear nappies at night, because he really, really wants a fish too!

Unfortunately, somebody forgot to tell his bladder.

He is getting better. The week started with around 3 accidents each night and this morning it was 6am before he woke me up to ask where his dry pajama bottoms were. He doesn't always wake instantly when wet, so I have no idea how long he is really lasting, but at least I am not getting woken repeatedly - that's progress, right?

So now there is a fish tank on the stairs waiting to find a permanent home, and the promise of a tank decoration to celebrate his first dry night. Maybe one day there will be a fish, too, but I won't hold my breath!

English or Maths?

I sometimes get the feeling I am going about this Early Learning thing all backwards.

Almost everyone focuses on reading. It is easy and most of the people who teach their child before school enjoy reading themselves. I love reading. I also love Maths. It has always been more important to me that Nikki love maths, because it is so easy not to.

Fortunately, Nikki is a Maths-y child. He has always loved numbers and counting. Encouragement is really not necessary - he begs me for his lessons! So our main educational focus has become Maths.

Unlike most early learners, Nikki can't read. He sounds out CVC words (which I have to remind myself is more than most children his age can do) but has shown no interest in memorizing sight words. Thus, if you give him a book he won't even try to read it.

This frustrates me, since I have done a lot of sight-word reading flashcards (primarily using LR) and he never shows any memory of words that I know he's seen HUNDREDS of times! (Unlike all the other children who read books at 2) So we're doing occasional Reading Bear and going through the motions of Little Reader and I'm planning lessons around a more traditional reading primer with the hope that it will make a difference.

So, for now, Maths is Nikki's choice. He is progressing easily through Saxon K and at this rate will be finished with the elementary textbooks before he starts school!

All I can do is pray that he'll be reading sentences by then, too!