Hi there!
I don’t have a schedule made up because our days follow a pretty consistent routine (with variation), but I can just type out what we do here if that’s interesting to you at all. It might SOUND like a lot, but it’s really not that much. Most of it happens in the morning, so the afternoons are generally free for napping and doing other fun activities (baking, swimming, outings, etc.). I generally find trying to do much of any of it in the afternoon is a waste of time, usually. I actually only really started this routine because I get SO bored playing cars or trains all day long. I was going crazy. This way we’re BOTH having fun. It does take some prep time, but i generally enjoy it.
We start flashing Doman math cards generally at breakfast and carry that on at random times throughout the day and of course we TRY to do it every day.
After breakfast we go to the learning centre where we start our home preschooling – we’ve recently started a new “curriculum” which is that each week we’re focussing on a new letter. We find rhymes, songs, poems and books that go with the letter. I post them up on the wall. Usually for the song i’ll make a visual aid to go with it (like for the farmer in the dell I’ll print pictures of a Dell, farmer, wife, child, nurse, etc., and put double sided tape on the back – as we sing, he’ll peel the character off and stick it in the dell - he really enjoyed that!). This week we’re doing letter I. I always choose two themes for the week (one for Monday one for Thursday) – this week: insects and instruments.
Monday I introduce the letter, the sound it makes, and we figure out several words together that start with that sound. We’ll say the poem and the rhyme and sing the song (more often than not has these memorized by Wednesday or Thursday). Then I flash the cards for that theme – insect, ladybug, spider, mosquito, fly, inch worm, grasshopper. Then we put them up on the wall and do matching with pictures. We then spend anywhere from half an hour to an hour and a half reading books (usually based on the theme) in our “Reading Bus” (a big huge school bus that I created and painted from a big long cardboard box, filled it with blankets and pillows and we lay in there and get cozy and read). I order a list of books from the library to make sure we have plenty based on the letter and the theme each week. After that we usually do geography (though sometimes this happens later in the day). My three year old knows about 90 countries on the map (I say the name and he points it out). We’ve been playing that game for a couple years now. I’m now introducing new countries that he doesn’t know based on the letter of the week. This week Israel (he already knows Iran, Iraq, India, Iceland and Indonesia, so Israel was all that was left for I) so I make a big card with Israel on it and put a ribbon from the card to the country. After that we’ll generally do a few activities on the computer while the baby is asleep. someone mentioned the reading eggs website and we checked it out, and that’s great so we’ve been doing that lately! We also try to do French (Rosetta Stone software) but i’ve not been terribly consistent. I’m trying to resolve to do better with that this year. Even the few times i’ve done it with him, i’ve been really surprised by how fast they pick it up!
Tuesday we’ll do a different activity based on those same words (like hide the words around the house and do a scavenger hunt, or make a book with the pictures, and then go on a scavenger hunt outside to find real versions of our words for the week (insects). Then we do the same repetition – stories in the reading bus, geography, computer time, with math thrown in all day long.
Wednesday we usually go into town to a rhyme and song program. He loves that. At some point on Wednesday we try to do science, which is picking two things from the letter theme – like animals (Iguana and Ibix), plants, sea creatures, whatever it may be, and we download pictures for him to colour while I read to him some facts about it. Or if we’re doing something found locally, we’ll find real life examples (found a bison farm for bison, etc). Or if we’re doing a plant, we’ll look outside and try to find one. If it’s an animal or plant from another country, we’ll print a little picture and tape it up to our world map for the week, on the place where it can be found (gorillas on Uganda, etc). We try to do math at various points in the day again.
On Thursday I’ll introduce the second theme of the week (while still flashing the first theme). This week our second theme is instruments – and we’ll basically do the same thing with the instrument cards – flash, match, and some activities (like trying out the real instruments, etc.). Then the same old books, geography, computer time, math cards. Starting this week a friend and I are going to try to do every thursday together, joint activities etc.
Friday we flash the first theme words, and do a different activity with the second theme words (or the same activity if it was a hit). Then we usually do the same: reading, geography, computer, math.
Aside from trying to continue flashing math cards, we take the weekend off.
That’s about it, I think.