Curriculum Map

Now that you know the "why" of this pre-preschool idea I had, I want to share with you the "what"I would teach him. One of the biggest lessons they tried to drill into our heads during my teacher training classes was the old phrase "Don't try to reinvent the wheel." So me and my good friend Pinterest are co-creators for what I use. Mostly, I knew what I wanted to do and I searched to see what other people had done and sort of just meshed it all together.

My goal was to have something to do each day with B that could focus on a letter of the alphabet. I found this curriculum map on Pinterest and thought it was incredible, but I didn't love it for us. So I tweaked it a little bit. I found this book list for each letter of the alphabet and decided that I don't really care if B knows alphabetical order yet. I also tried to think of fun "field trips" we could go on that wouldn't cost too much money and successfully get us out of the house for the afternoon.

Here is what I came up with.

Let me explain my reasoning a little bit. I first decided to place specific dated things (holidays, birthdays, etc) where they needed to be. Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentines day and B's birthday were on the schedule. Z was also taken care of because our zoo does free zoo days on the last Wednesday of the month during the winter (and I am cheap). Next I placed seasonal things where I thought they made the most sense. After that I just used the rest of the letters in whatever order I thought would be good. 

Most of the "Word of the Day"s only require one day to talk about them. However, if I felt like we could stretch it, do more than one activity for the word, or there weren't many other options for that particular letter I scheduled it for two days.

I also included field trips on the map. Generally for the field trips I scheduled two day- one day for reading a book or doing a project on the subject, the second day for the field trip.

The original plan was to have school go until the end of a regular school year, or at least until spring break for the school district we live in. But... I ran out of letters and I haven't planned anything yet. Maybe I'll get ambitious and start on counting or shapes when we're done with the alphabet. Until then, I hope this gives you some guidance or inspiration.