This school year, my children and I will be completing my new Preschool Curriculum at home. Each week will be based on a theme. Each theme will have several sections to make learning fun, progress in difficulty, and be easy to follow for teachers at home or in the classroom. I am hoping that it will be perfect for the earliest of learners, push more advanced learners, and make planning and teaching seamless for the teacher. This week, we began learning and started with the Welcome to School Preschool theme.
Kicking off the Theme
We began kicking off the theme with a fun back to school shelf in our house. The boys were excited to see all of the fun decorations hung up and talk about the school year ahead. If you would like a free back to school sign printable (for an 8×10 frame) to help you begin kicking off the theme, grab it here:
Learning the Letter A
Learning letters is one of the most important parts of a preschool curriculum. My hopes and plans were to have the letter order have a purpose and a reason behind it. So, we began this week with the Letter A (but just a hint, we won’t be going in alphabetical order!) We did all sorts of activities to begin learning the letter A.
I printed off my large letter A tracing page, laminated it, and grabbed play-doh. First, we made play doh A’s, talking about uppercase and lowercase A’s, and what sound the A makes. I also taught our letter A song for the week. Later in the week, we used that same paper to trace the letter A’s.
I also used our sensory bin A sound for two different activities. I printed off the sensory bin cards, and placed them in our pom pom bin. We grabbed one at a time, practice saying the A word, and matched the pictures together.
Then, we took the pictures on a bus ride. They had to go from the bus station to the school (pillow to pillow) one at a time. The bus driver had to say the A sound over and over again as they drove, then say the A word pictured on the card as it got to the school. This was a big hit for learning the letter A and one of the favorite parts of our welcome to school preschool theme week.
Learning the Number 1
Something that was really important to me when planning this new curriculum, was that it could be used for a wide variety of learners It truly can be used for your beginning preschoolers, and expanded for more advanced. This is the case for this week when we began learning the number 1
My son is almost 5. He can count to 20 and has good number awareness. So, it was easy for him to count to the number one. But, learning to write the number one was new. So, we focused on writing the number one. Then, when completely counting activities I would say things like, “find one more yellow object, now how many do we have?” So, he had to count to one and then count how many total we have. It was an easy and great way to expand for him and to really solidify learning the number 1.
Learning the Color Yellow
For the first few months of this curriculum, we will be learning a different color each week, until we learn all the basic preschool colors. This week was the color yellow! We began by doing a color yellow hunt. I cut out the pictures above, hid them around the room, and my children found them one by one. We talked about the color of each item, the name of the items, and then we found more yellow items around our house to go with these. Then, throughout the week as we drove around town we looked for yellow things outside our windows. I would say they have mastered the color yellow, now, and it was a fun way to begin learning the color yellow.
Wrapping up the Welcome to School theme
Overall, I would call it a very fun, and very successful first week of preschool at home. This can be done at home or in the classroom. So many activities were completed, and fun was had, what I wrote about it just scratching the surface! You can see more fun and details each day in my insta stores on @melissaslitteowlacademy. The highlight of my week was when my son began singing our fun letter A song all on his own. He can identify the letter A and its sound, the color yellow, and the number one. It was fun see how much he had learned in just one week when we were wrapping up the welcome to school theme. Overall the Welcome to School Preschool theme was a success and I can’t wait to see what next week holds!
You can find all that we did here:
https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Community-Helpers-Theme-Bundle-4832570