Something I notice about myself, I a very slow to pull the trigger. I like to marinate on things for a long time, I like to make sure all of the details are just right.
Something I notice about my daughter (and parenting in general), there really is no wiggle room for this. My daughter is at that great toddler age where her interests are vast and her attention is fleeting. You know the time where you finally get into listening to the same song 8 times a day, just created a new dance routine and all of the sudden it’s “no, no, no, no, not that one,” *face palm.*
Yes, those are the times in which we are engaged.
Well, I may have found a great way to a happy medium. She begins her more pointed homeschooling on Monday. I wrote out a very loose themed calendar, with 4 potential themes a month/a theme each week, loosely related to the time of year and the three letters of the month. I say loosely because for instance, last month we were working on her letter “K” and this month, our first focus letter is “A” and whenever I ask her to write an “A”, the page typically looks like the doodles of a white supremacist child doodling on their page during their first propaganda lesson… KKK AK KKK AK
So, I have that calendar prepped as a back up of sorts. As a lead Preschool Teacher and Kindergarten Instructor, I was required to plan the month (or at least 1-2 weeks) in advance. Sometimes it worked out perfectly, other times, a week would go by before any of the topics piqued the attention of the children. It is actually kind of counter-intuitive to what I learned about early childhood education, as we were taught to create lessons geared towards a child’s interest. How do you plan a month in advance when that age group drop best friends and favorite toys just about daily. Granted it is really not possible to do that with 12-20 three-year-old children in your class anyway, but that is another story altogether. I just know that based on how she is feeling that day, certain activities will be more favorable to her.
So, I am gathering free resources from as many different organizations and businesses as I can while this CV still has the world gripped in its net, to create her lesson plans for the future. Free scholarly articles, subscriptions, content, books, etc. I actually have more actual lesson plans/ideas for her middle school aged learning, than I do for her start on Monday.
Because she is only four, where I live she is technically starting 2 years early, so I am starting her out very slowly so we can be all the way into a groove by the time we are required to be fully immersed in the process, legally anyways.
I am excited to see how Monday’s 1.5 hours of schooling goes and where her interests and imagination takes us. These are the last days…
~Mai