Lesson Plan?

While they are still just 3 & 4, I have the luxury of sort of 'winging it' as far as homeschooling, as most of it is familiarizing them with the basics. I still am unsure about exactly the best way to go about it, but I wanted to document what I've been doing with them so far this week.

    I haven't been working one on one so much with them, but I think I might on John's days off. So when we have 'school time', (which lasts about 1-2 hours) we:
-label the day and date of the week on our calendar board, along with looking outside to check off what kind of weather we are having.

-I still haven't received my critical thinking curriculum books yet, so I have been tearing out a page from this preschool book from Costco for each of them to color, trace and write their name on. Lucas is really good at writing his name, Olivia is too stubborn to really try, but I forget she's a year younger.

-Usually Olivia colors messy and fast, both sides, but refuses to try to write her name other than "O". She tries to trace the word on the bottom of the page, either a color or shape. Lucas takes his time coloring inside the lines, taking more than twice the time she does. He writes his name by himself, and traces the word.

-then I let Olivia color in her coloring book, while I have Lucas write that day's word on the pre-lined little white board. Today's word was very long...I think I will instead start working on each letter individually with him tomorrow.

I liked this board at first, but then it gets hard to erase, and I also can't save his progress in his file. I will buy the paper next time.

-Then we do a craft involving their shape/color that day. Today we broke out the paint again. I drew simple pictures made of the shapes we learned, and had them first paint, then count how many of each shape there was. Lucas loved quitely taking his time painting, Olivia enjoyed sharing her painting with Norman. Lucas counted his shapes very well and wrote his name, Olivia (after fruit snack bribes) attempted to do the same.

-Then we used this big pad of paper to play the ball game lol. I asked them to find a letter or number on the board, and when they got it right they got a little fluff ball (from my old craft stuff I never used...) Olivia wouldn't put hers back yesterday since she won so many, so I let her glue them to a paper and count them together.

-We practice the colors. Today I asked each of them to 'push the button' next to the color that is the color of ____ (i.e. bananas, their blankie, grass etc) Then we drew the shapes we used in our painting today.

Lastly we go over the 10 commandments. They are sinking in and being used throughout the day. I regularly hear Olivia say, "Lucas you aren't following the commandment! You need to not steal/ hurt anyone!" But she is usually the one who needs to listen to them more..specifically the "be happy with what you have".

Then we put stickers up for doing their work, and for listening while we went over the commandments.


I am not sure if it's enough yet, but right now it can't hurt.

I also enrolled Olivia in a tap/ballet dance course, and Lucas in Tball. They both start in a few weeks! I am excited to see them both perform on a team. I know Lucas wants to dance, and Olivia wants to play sports (or so she says) so I will probably let them both do both, but I want to test the waters first.