Preschooling At Home

I have a feisty, happy, amazing 4 year old little miss. Unfortunately I live in a tiny small town that has 0 preschools within a 30 minute drive and we only have 1 car. That includes 0 Montessori programs in the public primary schools. There are about 5 churches within a few blocks of our house and NO PRESCHOOL PROGRAMS. I would looooove to send Al off to a preschool a few hours a day. I think the socializing before starting the big kid school next year would be great for her. But since I don't have a lot of options, we make do by having our own little preschool sesh in our home Monday-Friday. To expand further on how nerdy my children are (I love it!), my plan was to do Monday-Thursday but my daughter literally begged me, like actually begged, to do it on Friday too. So we do. Because who can say no to a kid that wants to learn? Not me.

This will probably be a series of posts because education and such is something I'm really into. This first post I just wanted to introduce a little of how we roll and really push hard my belief that teaching in your home doesn't have to be expensive, require a lot of tools, take a ton of time or make you pull your hair out. It doesn't need to be fancy.

For example- We are working hard at letter and number recognition. One of our favorite activities is just me writing out letters/numbers on a piece of paper and she takes letter/number stickers and identifies what it is and finds it on the paper. Easy peasy. And cheap! The cost of a piece of paper and a 1 dollar pack of stickers I got at Wal-Mart.

Another cheap activity we do is sorting something into the right order. We are learning to put 0-10 in order right now and it's so easy to just cut out some squares of paper, slap on a number and have her glue them into the right order. It's not fancy or pretty but it works.

We do invest in some helpful tools. Like our big preschool book. If you have a kid that loves worksheets, which mine does SO MUCH, then I really recommend them. So much bang for the buck! We paid around 12 dollars and we've been using it so much. Worth it. There are so many different activities. Sorting, counting, letter recognition, writing practice, shapes, patterns, mazes, connect the dots, color by number. Etc.

There are also a million printables that you could get offline. Pinterest is a great place to look for free activities. Printing things off, finding fun projects, etc. Use the internet for free resources and ideas!

And of course, your local library offers endless educational fun. Free books!

We also use ABC Mouse and I love it. Alice also loves it. It's only like 9 bucks a month and it's totally worth that, in my opinion. We usually do an hour or so of 'the Mickey mouse game' (as Al calls it, for whatever reason, chick has never even seen a Mickey mouse show) on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Gives me a little break but keeps her rolling.

It's not a ball buster to preschool at home. It's really not! It can be so easy and it can be enjoyable. I'll be back to talk more about some things we enjoy and some things that work for us and our plans for the future. Cheers.