School for the very young

I've always believed strongly that children shouldn't have open-ended play times, or free times.  With too much freedom, and not enough structure, they become naughty, begin fighting, and it leads to a day of disasters.  

One of the ways I combat this is by being structured myself.  Of course, children need freedom too.  Of course, they need free time, and of COURSE, they must learn to have fun too.  

But from a very early age, I begin my children on "school".  If this is something as simple as getting out a coloring book, and teaching them to color.  

I'm learning more and more that each child is sooo different.  But they CAN all be trained to enjoy school.  Perhaps they won't enjoy every single subject of school, but they can still enjoy SCHOOL. 

That is my goal at this early age.  Teach them to love it, and teach them some basics while I'm at it.  

I'm in now way an expert in this matter.  But these are a few of the things I've learned to implement in our school time. 

1. Phonics cards.  

We go thru the entire alphabet and all of the sounding out.  The girls love finding "their" letter and replacing that card with themselves.  Ex.  "G says g-g-g as in Gwendolyn" 

I just use the mini phonics cards from Abeka, since someone gave them to me.  

Be wary of dollar tree alphabet cards...often they will have weird pictures that aren't easy for little kids to figure out.  Or cartoon looking figures.  Also, often they are WRONG.  

example: a picture of a giraffe on the letter G

My dear friends in Maryland bought us these posters.  There are a lot of them we don't use (yet) and still others that are more simple than we need.  

We go thru the months of the year, chanting them.  The girls tell me who's birthday is which month.  Also, they tell me which holiday is in each month.  

Then we do numbers.  Right now we're counting to 30.  

For Bible time, I borrow these Sunday school Bible story cards from the church (since they arent being used there) and I read them a Bible account.  We've gone thru several of these packets so far this year.  

I ask them questions about the story after.

I kept these small bible verse flashcards from when I was a child, going thru the Bob Jones Bible workbooks.  Sometimes we just go through them all, other times I play a "game" with them....lay them face down and each girl picks one and has to say that verse perfectly for a "point".  The girl with the most points gets a skittle... 

anything like that.  So far they have about 15 verses memorized and 1 longer passage of scripture.  

These are more things I kept from my childhood.  They were in a small Dover book...wildflower flashcards.  The girls love learning about flowers (or ANYTHING), so we've memorized 10 of them, usually 1 or two facts about each flower.  I'm thinking we're ready to move on.  Maybe to mushrooms since we have lots of those that grow around the house and they'd be fun to identify.  

Lucie is only 2, so she has a small tracing the numbers book she uses, one brand new pre-k book that Mr. Jon (from church) gave her for Christmas, and one random coloring book.  She is learning to color the WHOLE picture, not just scribble the tiniest bit and say she's done.  :-)  

She LOVES her new workbook.  She traces letters, finds and circles the letters in a big jumble of letters mixed together, and also there are sometimes little mazes.  

Gwen finished one pre-k book.  I wasn't a fan of it.  It was from the dollar tree and the cartoon figures (like I already mentioned) were hard for her to recognize.  For example:  There would be a large scene and it would say "circle everything that begins with a C"....but the carrot didn't look like a carrot, it looked like a human with legs and arms, and face...hopefully you get the point.  I like SLIGHTLY more realistic pictures.  :-) 

The book she is doing now is better.  I get annoyed sometimes because they have lots of "color this picture" pages.  I feel like coloring pages should be in coloring books.  Gwen doesn't love coloring, she loves dot-to-dots, mazes, patterns, find the differences, all of those....

Another one of the posters we've memorized is the world map.  I know it's simple, but the girls know all of the continents and small facts about each one.  They're learning the oceans now.  

We have a States poster too.  They love to go thru and point out where we live, where Grandma and Grandpa live...where Mimi and papa live, etc.  

The girls have all of the shapes memorized, which is more than I had memorized in like, 2nd grade (or whenever we had to have those memorized haha).  They're favorites are Hexagon and Trapezoid.  

It's been soooo handy teaching them the days of the week.  Every day they ask me "What day is today?" and I make them figure it out by giving them hints.  "Well, yesterday was a day that starts with a T-H....tomorrow is the day Daddy doesn't work...so what day IS today?" 

That might give you an idea of what all we do.  We also have Piano lessons, which I started last month.  

and we do singing.  

I read them books about five times each day, since it's understood now...when I sit down to feed the baby, I read Gwen and Lucie a book or two as well.  :-)  They remind me EVERY time.

Dan has begun teaching them Spanish as well.  They love running around the house saying the spanish words for things.

The girls beg me each day to do school.  Some days I have a lot of other stuff and we don't get to it.  But yesterday it was almost 9pm and Lucie started crying because I had said earlier that we might do school and we still hadn't.  

I remembered why I started school for them so early.  

So you can guarantee we went downstairs and did school time before bed.  If I can squeeze it in to the day, I will make that extra effort to do so.