What does your accelerated preK day look like?

[Josh Blade]

We have a semi formal schedule / curriculum for our 4.5 year old and have since about 3. She's been reading on her own since just before she turned 3 and has always enjoyed her 'lessons' so we've gone through all of BFSU 1 (finished in about a year), probably 60% of what's available on Mystery Science, Right Start A, 100 EZ Lessons (which we used to teach reading and it worked well for her), several Explode the Code and Beyond the Code books, and What your Kindergartner needs to know.

 

Our current curriculum consists of RSO (hopping back and forth between Biology and Earth and Space), Right Start B (in the last 20 lessons or so and just ordered BA 2A), Explode the Code / Beyond the Code, and What your 1st Grader needs to know (mostly using this for history), some read alouds led by me or mom -although these are mostly at bedtime these days (DD and Mom just started Harry Potter 3) and read alouds led by DD. We only spend 1-2 hours per day 2-5 days per week (probably averaging 3 days). We aim for 5 days when everyone is feeling well and our schedules are clear, but that honestly rarely happens. We don't really push school time too much other than to say "Alright let's go do some X now". The rest of the time is spent playing on her Fire tablet, running around causing chaos with her little brother, playing outside, etc. We try to go somewhere like the zoo/aquarium/science museum/natural history museum/children's museum once or twice a month. I work from home and my wife is in her last year of her masters / certification program for teaching high school English. We split the homeschooling duties pretty evenly. On days I'm not super busy with work, I'll do all or most of the lessons, but sometimes they have to wait until mom gets home. We consciously try to incorporate reinforcing skills/knowledge during every day life by talking about what we've learned in science lessons and how it relates to every day life (BFSU has given us a fount of topics we can bring up while doing basically anything), having DD help us with cooking and understanding measuring, counting money, telling time, reading signs, maps, directions etc. 

 

Listing out everything we've done now sounds impressive, but it hasn't been because of some herculean effort on our part. It's been our daughter's interest in learning and taking things small chunks at a time and it adds up over a couple of years.

 

Our 2.5 year old on the other hand barely speaks (enough now that we can usually get the gist of what he wants) and isn't even all that interested in being read to most of the time.

Edited September 7, 2017 by Josh Blade

[Black-eyed Suzan]

One thing I wish I would have done more of is work on the child's weak areas as well as playing to the child's strengths. For my oldest, that was fine motor skills. He disliked them, so I avoided them. I regretted that later! I would have googled different ways of encouraging the difficult skills and made an effort to practice those skills every day.

 

You mentioned that losing gracefully is a weak area. You might teach her a game like War where you "lose" a little or "win" a little each play of the game. Even if you just play a couple of rounds every day and put it away, it might help her practice. And you could incorporate it into math learning (for example The Game that is worth 1,000 Worksheets).

 

Hope that helps!

[Mommyof1]

Great suggestions, thanks!

[Donna]

When my dd was preschool age, our day was very much child-led. I kept everything on shelves where she could reach it...books, math manipulatives, puzzles, toys, play doh, coloring books, workbooks for learning to write letters, numbers, follow mazes, drawing paper, her violin, etc...

 

I would do school with her brothers for a few hours and she'd sit in doing some of what they were doing such as learning Latin, watching them do science experiments, or listening to stories in history. Sometimes she'd bring out her "school books" and sit and do them while her brothers worked. We lived on a lake and collected tadpoles and caterpillars to watch them develop, grew plants and experimented with necessary "ingredients" for growing, looked at mosquito larva, plant parts, blood, and skin under the microscope, and did dissections of different animals. We talked about the life cycle of the baby geese, swans, and ducks on the lake and learned the names of trees and flowers we saw.

 

We did a lot of reading...I read to her and she read to me. She was reading well by 3.5 but didn't have the endurance to read whole chapters of the books she wanted to read so she'd read the first page or two then I'd finish the chapter. She started memorizing every book read to her at 11 months old so once she started reading, I read her poetry which she loved to memorize as well. Whenever she picked up her violin, I sat and practiced with her for however long she was interested. We listened to a lot of music from different genres. She had listening to do for her violin lessons (the Suzuki method involves daily listening) but loved to listen to other music as well...sing along to Phantom of the Opera or listen to Bach or dance to world music. She took violin lessons (private and group classes) and at 5 started Irish fiddle lessons as well.

 

Mostly we played. Her brothers entertained each other and I sat and played with her. She loved playing with her Playmobil castle mostly, making up intricate story lines (mostly having to do with sequels to Phantom of the Opera because she was obsessed with it...I think she had over a hundred sequels and she knew which sequel was which by number, I was horrible for not remembering each story line). She loved games with math manipulatives and by 5 when she started officially "doing" school, was up to 3rd grade level in math...she learned to add and subtract, then figured out multiplication and division all through play.

 

We all went outside and took walks in the park or along the lake or took bike rides or walked the dog around the block talking to neighbors as we went. She participated in taekwondo classes (her brothers took classes and I taught), took gymnastics classes, and started soccer.  We went to the library weekly, took trips to the zoo or the aquarium, and went to any free/inexpensive live music performances we could find. By the time dd was 5, she was sitting in on Irish music sessions in pubs playing along at least once a week (and getting angry if anyone dared offer her a small chair because she didn't want them to notice she was smaller than them).

[ElizabethB]

My kids did a bit of Read, Write, Type on the computer and a few minutes of phonics on the white board, they were able to write in uppercase on a whiteboard at that age. You can also use letter tiles or magnetic letters or my letter sound cards:

 

http://www.thephonicspage.org/On%20Reading/Resources/40LChartsCombined.pdf

 

Read, Write, Type. It is pretty fun and easy to do by themselves once they are walked through how it works a few times.

 

http://www.talkingfingers.com/read-write-type/

Edited September 19, 2017 by ElizabethB

[Have kids -- will travel]

OP, I suspect the reason the initial responses weren't satisfactory is that many posters here don't considered an accelerated five-year-old to be "preK level". Many people responded with an answer for their preK kids, thinking you mean a three- or four-year-old. A five-year-old is already more capable of sitting for academic activities.

 

It sounds like you have a wonderful child and want to offer more. I can't help much, as I went back to work when my oldest hit preK age (just turning 5), but there's no reason not to offer math, reading, writing, and much more at that age. My six-year-old in first grade is just now starting to figure out that it isn't all a game, so there's also no reason not to make the academics as engaging, entertaining, and game-like as possible.

[Pegs]

We did story time and games time every day.

 

Stories - we read to one another. I would choose a little phonics-based reader for DS to read to me, and he would choose something for me to read to him.

 

Games - we did almost all of K through 2 maths using games, we filled in the gaps with Khan Academy's Early Math mission, then DS started BA3 a little while before he turned 7. We also played a lot of phonemic awareness and spelling games using Scrabble tiles, and I made a magnetic fishing game for learning basic phonics.

 

We also made *many* trips to the library, and worked on core and shoulder strength and fine motor skills in preparation for beginning handwriting instruction.