gr8tfulCMmom–How uplifting it is to be reminded that God’s grace covers us. I can get so focused on the pursuit of the “perfect” everything (curriculum, schedule, chore charts, etc.); as if God can’t do this without me. 😆 It’s great to hear your success story.
With my oldest (who just turned 4) he did spend a lot of time outside – but I also had twins the week after he turned 2 so I couldn’t let him be outside as much because of bed rest prior to them being born and then just having 2 newborns kept us inside a good bit. We read, read, and read some more and then he asked for me to teach him to read, so we started basic phonics teaching and he reads for himself now. I felt like if any “formal” teaching was to be done, learning to read was it. I didn’t want to pressure him because he was so young, so I just kept with his pace. He really enjoyed “playing school” and we did a lot of dot-to-dots, coloring, cutting and pasting, stickers, folding and things such as that that work on fine motor skills. When he gets really interested in a topic we check out a lot of books from the library about that and read them. As far as math type things, we just count a lot around here, he loves puzzles and board games and any type of building block. All that to say when I have been researching curriculum and read what the pre-k and K programs look like and cover – they look a lot like the things we already do around here. So I prefer the much cheaper and more tailored to our family route of teaching in the milieu using things he is already interested in.
also, in response to the comments earlier about days seeming monotonous and speaking of habits training – that makes me think of the habit of regularity as spoken of in LDTR. I did find with my oldest that he needed some spoken of structure to his day. I made him a “schedule” with pictures (before he could read) that showed him what the day looked like. Now this “schedule” had: brush teeth, eat breakfast, play outside, eat lunch, etc. and was in hourly gaps – nothing very tedious at all. We gave him a watch and off he went. He was thrilled to feel like he had some control over his day and he also knew what to expect so this cut down on the trips back to the door to ask if it was time to come in or time for lunch or time for …. It removed the decision making for him and freed him up to think about playing and if he knew it was playing outside time he had several “projects” that he had come up with to work on outside. We also reserved some activities for rainy days or sick days so he wasn’t constantly wanting to come in on a gorgeous day. This really seemed to cut down on the questioning of what was to be going on – he knew what to expect, even if what to expect was complete freedom to choose! (plus he was learning to tell time and didn’t know it!)