Pre-K at Home

I've been looking into ideas for how to help Ashton academically (as academic as a 2 year old can be...) There are quite a few cute ideas to be found, but to be honest, and this may sound bad, I really don't mean to be judgmental, but the uber-gung-ho christian force behind a lot of homeschooling blogs and resources kind of turns me off. I'm as religious as the next person and appreciate parents choosing to integrate that into their homeschool experience, but I'm not into that.

For instance, through my search I was brought to a page where it seemed like the mom was transforming her family to follow all of the same values and principles as the Duggar Family from TLC's 19 Kids and Counting. Actually it didn't even seem that way, she plainly stated, that's what she was doing. Using their book as reference.

That's great for them, if that is where their beliefs lie. That's really not what I'm interested in. Haha.

Many of the other resources I've found from other sights are just, how do I put this delicately... Not very cute. In essence, I guess, I've just had a hard time finding a completely secular cirriculum with all the fun and cuteness of some of the more religious based programs. Where's my happy medium?!

Luckily, I'm a DIY addict. I'm always looking at cute ideas and thinking of how I can recreate or do something similar to cater to my family. And since all I'm really wanting to do is a little preschool/kindergarden prep with my 2 1/2 year old, it really should not be that complicated.

Here are a few ideas I wanted to start out with:

ABC cards- For these, I have decided to do upper case on one side and lower case on the other. I know that Ashton can already identify all the upper case letters, so I know that I specifically want to focus on pairing the lower case with the upper case and the sounds of each letter.

Number Cards- Ashton is not really familiar with numbers yet, he can count to 3 but recognition and counting are still things that we need to start at the beginning. To have a little fun with counting, I thought we could use some of his small toys, trains or cars and work up to counting 10 of them. I've seen some people recommend to have one bucket full of the toys to be counted and an empty bucket to place the ones that have been counted. Not only to help keep count, but to help them recognize amounts.

Science- I wanted to make sure to do something outdoors. Ashton loves to be outside and explore, really, what toddler doesn't? So I came up with a few ideas of things we could do: a nature walk, collecting small, interesting things like leaves, sticks, pine cones, rocks. Then bring our spoils home and inspect them! It would be fun to have a small magnifying glass and talk about the properties of each item.



After working on our letters for a bit, we had some fun building towers then knocking them over! Being this kid's mama is great!