This year my son will be doing his second year of preschool! Our first year was focused around learning and mastering his letters-uppercase and lowercase (Letter A Week Curriculum.) Check out all we used last year HERE. This year we will focus on mastering all the beginning sounds for each letter and starting to learn a few sight words.
At this young age I believe playing, exploring, and imagination are most important. Shaping their character and spending quality time with them, rather than drilling them with schoolwork, is what I hope to work on the most. So if my son doesn’t want to do schoolwork, I put it away and don’t push it. However, this summer he has been begging me to teach him how to read and is usually the first one at the school table eager to learn, so these are the activities/curriculum we will be using this year.
1. The Good and the Beautiful PreK Course Book: I love this book! The lessons are simple, short, and fun. With this book we will learn letters and sounds, colors, shapes, counting, sorting, vowels, and more. It has great games and flip books as well as lots of hands on, fine motor practice with cutting/pasting, etc.
2. The Good and the Beautiful K Primer Course Book : When we complete the PreK course book, we will continue on with the K Primer. This book has you mastering the letter sounds and starting phonemic awareness/isolating sounds, as well as long and short vowels. You continue to learn numbers up to 15, and start reading simple 2-3 letter words with the reader.
I have used both of these books previously with my daughter and love them! When we are close to finishing the PreK book I will purchase the K Primer for my son, but until then here is a little of the inside from when my daughter used it a few years ago.
3. The Good and the Beautiful Doodles & Pre-Writing for Littles: This is a small handwriting book that will help in forming letters and shapes for those that are just learning. It helps with fine motor skills and correct pencil grip. I have a feeling we will fly through this book (my son loves handwriting/tracing,) so we will continue some handwriting practice with the Kick Start Kindergarten course book from Handwriting Without Tears next.
**For any of The Good and the Beautiful curriculum, you can check out their website to see tons of sample pages of each.
4. Sight Words: For teaching sight words I will use a lot of the same resources I did with my daughter- Let’s Play School Sight Word Pack/Play & Learn Sight Words Set, Moffat Girls Emergent Readers, and Bitty Beginnings Read It, Build It, Write It Set. I will also be using a similar schedule where I only teach 2-3 new sight words each week. **Be sure to check out my Teaching Sight Words post where I share these amazing resources and how I teach sight words!
Let’s Play School no longer offers this Sight Word Pack, but be sure to check out her Play & Learn Sight Words set. It includes fun games and activities to learn sight words up to 3rd grade, themed for each month of the year!
5. Dash Into Learning- Set 1 Beginning Readers: I love to use these books to reinforce our sight words and begin reading. They are an early phonics program with beautiful stories crafted to build reading skills. They also have fun activity packs you can add that correspond with each book. There are 10 books in each set (goes up to Set 3- 2nd grade reading level.) My daughter loves these!
Let’s Play School Monthly Subscription: For some extra fun we love to use our monthly subscription from Let’s Play School. Each month features a new theme with 20 printable activities: 10 preschool learning activities and 10 early elementary (kinder/1st grade) learning activities. All the activities are SO fun and hands on, focusing on handwriting, reading, language arts, math, or pretend play. Below are a few photos from one of the months (Insects theme) and a blog post you can read more about it! It is so worth it, we love it!
Beginning Sounds Games: My son LOVES playing games, so these are a bunch of the games we will be playing this year to work on mastering our beginning sounds.
Now this is all mostly phonics, reading, and writing. For math, we love to just play together counting cars, trains, etc. This Montessori Math Shapes Puzzle is a great toy we own that we use for practicing counting and adding/subtracting. I try to have them learn their numbers up to 20 at this age.
I love to do simple notebook pages for learning number recognition also. Write random numbers all over the page and give them a sheet of stickers. Call out a number and have them place a sticker on it. There is an endless amount of these type of games that my son loves. Check out Literacy In Motion Instagram page of all the fun journal page ideas she shares!
These printable pages from Bitty Beginnings are great for number recognition practice too!
Along with these subjects, my son will also love to join in on our zoology science and bible lessons I am doing with my daughter for 1st grade. Check out those curriculums and resources HERE.
Reading lots of stories, playing games, and spending quality time together is all apart of our “school” day.
It’s going to be a great year!
