A Preschool homeschool Sample day at my house

James and I have found our groove lately. He is even ASKING for school and reminds me if I don't get to it in the mornings. I love that. :) So here is what a typical morning looks like for us.

• Wake up: 7:30-8:00am

Then downstairs to enjoy coffee for me and chocolate milk or hot chocolate for James. Let the dogs out and give them treats.

• School "lesson": 9ish-10isham

Still in my PJ's, I go prepare our lessons for the day. I am still using the Calvert School PreK Curriculum so everything is pretty much laid out lesson by lesson in the big book. I also add worksheets from www.education.com from time to time depending on the lesson topics for the day. I use those mostly to encourge James to write and draw. It's not his favorite but he will do dot-to-dot pictures, mazes and tracing letters and numbers.

1.  Today's Date on "My First Daily Planner" banner
2. Pledge of Allegiance which has been "Red, White and Blue, I love you!" I am not working on teaching the actual Pledge.
3. Picture Study Art: Rembrandt's "Christ shows his wounds to doubting Thomas".   So far, we have studied "Jacob Wrestling with the Angel" and "The Militia of Captain Frans Banning Cocq, known as 'The Night Watch'". We study each piece of art for a week.
4. The topic for the next couple of days is wild animals. It's review for him but the lessons encourage careful observation (pre-reading skill), talking about what he knows and the lesson usually incorporates math as well.
5. Story from an included book with the curriculum that fit with the topic
6. Singing the ABC song.
7. Occasionally a topic will lead to more questions from James so we scoot over to the computer and look up videos or stories. Reaches have included Big Foot, Angels, The Devil, various wild animals, weather (i.e. tornadoes).

All of this takes about 20 minutes of our morning and we are done. There are days that we may miss a lesson so I will combine the best of a couple (or three) lessons in order to "catch up". I got behind during the Christmas holiday and the aftermath. I started combining lessons and skipped items that would require us, for example, to talk about snowmen in March. We still do additional reading during the day at nap time and bed time...and any other time James might request a book. He goes through phrases of favorite activities so we do that too. For a while, it was Candyland all day, everyday. Right now, he just can't keep his little monkey paws off any electronic in the house. Every time I turn around he has my phone, or Chris' phone, his Leap pad, my camera, or my Nook. He knows how to use all of them. He knows how to download the free games to my phone. I'm waiting for it to start smoking from all the activity on it.We now have the capability to Skype, too, so he has been enjoying that as well.

This sample and the length of lessons are great for preparing James for next year. He can hardly sit still for 20 minutes so that in itself is good practice for him. The rest of the day is incidental learning for him. I also try to give him plenty of outdoor time to play and run around. We have been doing picnics at the park with nature walks around the lake and playground time.

So, gotta tie this up and get my lessons ready for this morning. I am still in my pj's and I hear James' leap pad from the living room. :)