Yesterday in my post when I wrote that I would not be using curriculum for prek as I felt it was an unnecessary expense, I meant for us, for my family, for our situation.
The thing is that some people need or want a curriculum and that is okay. If I could, if money weren't an issue, if I had money coming out of my ears, I would buy the Singapore Math curriculum - even for preK. For ideas to go with books we read, I would in a heartbeat buy the Itty Bitty Bookworm curriculum. You can read my review of it here. Curriculum cuts out so much work! Curriculum provides a scope and sequence and a guide to follow.
For our family, we can't right now. I would rather spend the little money we have set aside for preschool on manipulatives than curriculum. Thankfully, I was a teacher and I can look at learning objectives and right away see what activities we could do. Bear is young and right now it doesn't matter if preK is more play based anyway. I will be pulling from different curriculum resources that I have available. I will continue to use many activities from Itty BittyBookworm, I will definitely pull from this math curriculum and I will also find thousands of great ideas online :)
What great curriculum do you know of or use?
I get some ideas from New Child Montessori Guides.
ReplyDeleteAs you said, I would also like to add to what we have, but money does not allow us to purchase everything we want:)
I LOVE you blog!
Progressive Phonics, of course, but then again, I already was talking about it non-stop on my blog. I am just commenting on it here for the benefit of your other readers.
ReplyDeleteAs a former teacher, I also don't feel the need to buy any specific curriculum materials.
ReplyDeleteI prefer not to use one curriculum, or educational philosophy. Through my teaching experience I have found that a "canned curriculum" can be very rigid (not always the case, but generally speaking).
For me personally, I spend a great deal of time researching different ideas and resources. I incorporate a variety of different educational philosophies into our activities.
I take the same approach to curriculum - our current (limited) finances are better used on educational manipulatives.
ReplyDeleteI've started using a few things from progressive phonics after reading about it on Natalie's blog, and I found some nice math pages at tlsbooks.com. I put all of our writing activities in plastic page protectors (not sure if you already do this too) so that Emma can write on them with white board markers and re-use them over and over.
My daughter is not even 1 1/2 yet so I definitely have not thought of purchasing a preschool curriculum yet. But I know even now that I probably won't when the time comes. I also don't have lots of money and even $20 a month seems like a lot when there is such a wealth of FREE information on the web. I like Hubbard's Cupboard and I am already planning on using some ideas from her 2's curriculum in the upcoming year.
ReplyDeletejust a quick note - i clicked on the link to your previous post and it comes up with a photo of a lemonade stand !?!? - i'm sure you don't mean that all curriculum's are "lemons" LOL :)
ReplyDeletehave just found you blog and am liking what i've seen
5+2=1
@ 5+2=1 Thank you. I don't know how that happened. I will try to fix that after the kids go to bed. Thank you for bringing it to my attention!
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