A Little Bit of Homeschooling

  While we were off-island, the Army rolled out a new fee schedule for all its Child Development Center.  It has a new category that applies only to government contractors, with fees that are hundreds of dollars more per month than we pay now.  They've also said that the multiple child discount can't be applied to families in the new category.  Since those two things together would mean that we wouldn't be able to afford to send Sky and Fire to the CDC, we've had to come up with a bit of a plan.  It involves something we never really thought we would do:  homeschooling.
  We're not going to be making any drastic changes, although we did consider them.  I'll still be working but I have to reduce my hours so that we're no longer in the highest fee category.  That will give me four extra hours a week that I'll be spending with Sky, doing pre-K since there's no pre-K teacher at the Kwaj CDC right now and D and I really think she's ready to keep learning.  She and I tend to butt heads during concentrated time together and I really don't want that to happen while I'm teaching her.  I'm hoping that I can be creative enough to keep her interested and forgiving enough to understand that she's not always going to just sit there and do what I tell her to.
  We've "played school" twice already for about 10 minutes each time.  Once we practiced skip counting and the second time I started teaching her some phonics letter sounds.  Those two times went really well and I have some ideas on how to break things up, as well as some workbooks on order so that Sky won't always have me talking at her.   I'm going to focus on number memorization and recognition, phonics and reading, and handwriting.  Have you homeschooled for pre-K?  What has worked, or not worked, for you? 

Comments

  1. Oh those child care fees can be tough. I definitely hear you on that (I used to work in child care and I always sympathized with the families when fees went up... even though I knew it was necessary).

    I try to do playful learning strategies with my youngest.
    i.e. placing a letter flashcard on a magnetic board and have her find the matching one in a bowl of letter magnets; tracing letters in a sand tray; sorting letters into bowls, etc.)

    There's a great homeschooling blog that has lots of these types of "tot-school" and "pre-school" ideas - it's called 1+1+1=1 Maybe try checking that out.

    Good luck to you.
    xoxo

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    1. I look for that blog today- thanks for the tip! We had our first "class" this morning and it went great. I was so worried about how it would go since it was kind of an off-morning to start with, but we made it through phonics flash cards, a beginning-sounds worksheet, and counting to twenty. Hurray for a good start!

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