Thursday, July 23, 2009

Curriculum (and life) planning for next year

If our short little trial run this spring taught me anything, it's that I need to plan more, and be more flexible. I know. It sounds contradictory, right? I realized that I need to plan and prepare for everything that I'd like us to do (because if I don't plan ahead, nothing gets done,), and also be ready to scrap the plans and be ready to do something entirely different or nothing at all if that's what the situation dictates. I'm sort of an all or nothing person, so I'm finding it hard to get my head around that.
Our day to day life is pretty variable around here currently. Part of it has to do with my husband's wacky work schedule. Part of it has to do with L's highly variable behavior. Part of it is due to me constantly dragging around like a sleep deprived zombie. We've never been very good at keeping schedules, but I'm trying to get better at it.
So anyway, my husband and I had a talk about what our goals for L next year are. It was nice to find that we were basically on the same page. Of course, we want him to be learning academic stuff, but we're fairly relaxed about the what and the how of it. He already functions at about a kindergarten level in many academic areas, if and when we can get him to cooperate. (Big if, big when.) We want to continue to work in the areas that he seems to be behind on, namely self care issues and social situations. Finally, we are going to continue to pursue a possible diagnoses and and some sort of treatment for whatever it is that's going on with him.

As for the particulars of our curriculum, here's the (ambitious, at least for us,) plan for now:

We'll be using the Itty Bitty Bookworm Bo PreK curriculum for the main portion of L's work. (I was fortunate enough to win it in a giveaway a while back, after trying several months on different blog giveaways.) It looks great, is very inclusive, is primarily based on quality children's books, and basically covers everything you'd expect a PreK curriculum to cover. (I'm planning on posting a more thorough review of it later, after we've been using it for a while.)

Additionally, I'm hoping to work on the following areas 1 time per week:

Art: possibly pertaining to the topics being covered in the regular curriculum, maybe seasonal or holiday activities. As much as I'd like L to just paint or color or glue or whatever for the pure fun of it, he isn't really into that right now.

Spanish: At this point, we're going to keep it pretty simple. I've got a couple of Boca Beth DVDS and a CD. We're going to use those, as wells as the free stuff she has posted on YouTube.

Cooking: I'm just going to make a point to try to make something fun and kid friendly with L once a week. He loves to cook.

Music: This is going to consist of goofing around on the guitar with his dad. We're also looking at possibly buying him some drums soon, but we aren't pursuing formal lessons at this point.

Field trip: Something fun and at least semi educational once a week.

The only thing I'm still stumped about bible/religion. At this point I'm thinking of just reading a children's bible with him, and doing some related crafts or something. Does anyone have any suggestions in this arena for a PreK aged kiddo?

Anyway, that's that's the plan, as of now. I need to go ahead and order the required books, I guess.

So what are your plans for next year?

2 comments:

  1. http://www.biblestudyguide.com/enter.htm
    I just bought this to use with my kiddos. I like the fact that I can continue to use it through all the years if we like it enough. It's got a kids workbooks that goes with the lessons that for the prek level was mostly coloring and following directions. It also had review questions. Maybe it'll work for your little guy.

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  2. Thanks for the heads up. That's one I haven't seen before. I'll go check it out.

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