Preschool Curriculum Part 1

My posts regarding my preschool curriculum will come in a few posts.

About a year ago I wanted to start a preschool type program since I had a few kids that were going to Kindergarten that year.  I had purchased this book from Amazon because it had decent reviews, and I thought it would cover a lot of what needed to be covered before a child started Kindergarten.

Ultimately, it didn't work out at the time.  Most of the kids that I watched just weren't ready for the kind of activities in the book, so I just did it with the older kids.  Out of the kids that completed the activities they seemed to like them a lot.  At times the activities were much to young for them, so I would think this book would work best for 3-4 year olds.  Even though my son is within this age range, he doesn't want to complete the activities.  He would much rather watch someone else do them.

I think it will be useful to work on handwriting, so I will be using this as a supplemental aspect of my preschool curriculum.  Most of the book won't work for my son because he already knows his upper/lowercase letters, and numbers.  I will use some of the counting/math pages, the pages that work on cutting, and writing.

Pros

• The front of the book has a great assessment for the parent to complete on their child to help them know how ready their child is for Kindergarten. 
• Another aspect of this book that I like is that it has a perforated line to allow easy removal from the book.  This made it easy to make photocopies of the pages.  
• A variety of activities.
• Great for letter recognition

Cons

• Some activities seem way too easy while others seem quite difficult.

For those of you that are doing preschool at home, I would recommend that you buy pencil grips.  I bought a few packages because they are easily lost.  I know that most Kindergarten teachers wish that parents would teach their child the correct way to hold a pencil.  These will help with that.  I believe they work for both right and left handed children.  

If you bought both of these items you would spend $23.00.  I am keeping receipts for tax purposes, but I am not sure it will count for preschool.