Congratulations, on starting your homeschool journey! Earlybird can help your set up your preschool homeschool curriculum. We are your one stop shop for all your home schooling needs in these preschool years.You may be surprised to realize that the school part of your day doesn't take up the 6 full hours traditional school does. Between all your library stops, playground explorations, and museum visits, you may only do 1-2 formal preschool learning activities a day! So you preschool home school curriculum should be as flexible as your family rhythm is.
Okay, but WHAT do I need to teach my toddler?
When you set up your preschool homeschool curriculum there are a few core developmental domains you will want to make sure you cover. Current research shows that strong literacy (think reading and writing) and numeracy (think math and science) skills in the early years remain strongly linked to later academic achievement outcomes (Duncan et al., 2007; Li-Grining et al., 2010). However, we now know that social-emotional skills such as, self-control, turn-taking and attention are also critical (Bodovski and Farkas, 2007; DiPerna et al., 2007), and motor and higher thinking skills such as creativity, problem solving, and imagination are of equal importance to academic skills. (Pan, Trang, Love & Templin, 2019).Luckily for you Earlybird has you covered -we have literacy, numeracy, social-emotional, motor and art sections on our platform. We cover it all! Each activity gives you an introduction to the developmental skills it will be covering. So all you have to do is pick an activity from that platform and rest assured your child is targeting an important early learning skill.
I can do that. But what activities do I start with?
In the early years, you can skip the workbooks and boring pencil and paper tasks. You want your preschool homeschool curriculum to be joyful. Research shows that children learn best when they follow their natural interests and explore concepts and new ideas while they play. Play based learning equips children with the skills they need to become independent learners who have the confidence to seek out their own answers and solutions to problems.So when picking activities think first about what the child is interested in and see if we have an Earlybird theme for their interest. Do they seem super into letters? numbers? STEM challenges? dramatic play? understanding emotions? winter activities? We have themes for all of those!
My kid will LOVE that. But how do I plan my week?
You will want to pick 1-2 formal activities per day for your child to do. Once the activity is done, it can be added to their learning task bins where they can come back to it at another time (more on that in the next section).As an Earlybird member you will receive a weekly newsletter that lays out some activity suggestions for each age group (0+, 1+, 2+, 3+, 4+) on a common theme. All the activities for the younger ages are still appropriate for the older ages. So you can pick from the weekly suggestions or scour the Earlybird platform on your own to plan your week. When you find an activity that is interesting just save it to your saved folder on the Earlybird platform.When you are ready to do the activities you can quickly set it up and get learning! All of our play-based early learning ideas are no or low prep, and use every day materials -no need for fancy toys and expensive learning materials. If you need a list of supplies to start collecting, you can find one here.
That is amazing! So how do I keep all my homeschool materials organized?
The way you organize your homeschooling space and supplies will go a long way toward promoting independent play and child-led learning. Keeping learning activities organized into task bins is a great strategy to make the learning materials accessible to the child AND your space organized. So once you have done an activity with the child and they know how to do it, you can add it to their task box along with the supplies they need. The child can then go and find their task bin, and get learning whenever they feel like it! This means that you will introduce your child to a few new activities and ideas per week, but they will be take the lead in their learning from there by visiting their task bins regularly to keep learning. You can watch our instagram live with Lacey where we help her set up tasks.
Happy learning! Join us at www.learnwithearlybird.com and don't hesitate to reach out if you have any questions about your homeschool curriculum.
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