For anyone who missed this past Sunday’s email, my computer crashed last week, and I lost quite a bit, including my ebook Pinterest Preschool, which was supposed to be released today as a subscriber freebie. After taking a hard look at my schedule, I unfortunately don’t have time to rewrite and reformat that book right now. But I still want to share that information with you! This will be a long one, but if I miss anything, ask your questions in the comments!
The Internet is full of resources for teaching your children, whether you choose to homeschool or just to supplement their learning at home. But it can be overwhelming to look at all of the options out there. By planning first, you can then use online resources to find projects, activities, and learning tools to teach your children pretty much anything. My personal favorite is Pinterest, and I’ve used it to teach both of my boys preschool.
Plan Your Planning
Before you can find specifics, you need to figure out the big things.
- What subjects are you going to teach? We usually stick with Letters of the Week and Math Concepts (more about those below), but you can also add in other things that are important to you or are of interest to your child.
- When are you going to plan? Are you going to figure everything out before you start teaching, or plan each week the Sunday beforehand?
- How are you going to keep track of your lesson plans and what you actually end up doing? Are you going to keep track? You are not required to keep track of preschool hours at home if you’re homeschooling, but it may be nice to have a record of what you’ve taught your child. If you’re a list person like I am, it’s great to have a place to keep track of what you want to get through in the coming week.
My Favorite Resources for Planning:
- Weekly Lesson Plan Sheet and Simple Unit Study Planning Sheet
- [my own tracking sheet free printable if I have time for it]
- How To Plan A Simple Unit Study
- My Binder System For Homeschool Planning
- How I Plan My Homeschool Year
What Should I Search For On Pinterest?
- Know your educational philosophy, and search “[educational philosophy] planning”
- For different recordkeeping resources, search “homeschool weekly planner” for many different printables and ideas of how to keep track of things. Even if you’re not planning on homeschooling, you’ll still find plenty of useful things here!
photos pictured belong to the sites pinned, which you can see here
Planning Letter of the Week
Letter of the Week is one of the most common ways to teach children their letters, as the first step toward learning to read. In our house, we spend 26 weeks learning what the letters look like, one per week, and then 12-15 weeks working on what sounds they make, two to three letters per week. That works out pretty well for a September through May school year.
There are two main ways I use Pinterest for planning Letter of the Week.
1. A to Z Lists. I have a board dedicated to my A to Z Lists, where I save various posts that have ideas or worksheets for every letter of the alphabet. Here are a few of my favorite lists:
- Teaching Preschool With Toy Cars (from A to Z!)
- Book Lists like these
- Activities like these exercises for each letter
- Sensory play activities for each letter (Letter K on this list is still requested by my children on a regular basis)
- Craft Projects like these cupcake liner projects for each letter
- Worksheets like these mazes for each letter
- Printable hats for each letter
- Snack ideas for each letter
2. Letter Boards. You can either make a board for each letter, or group them together like I have, about 5 letters at a time. This is where you can save specific links for each letter. These include things like:
- C is for Create a Cupcake project
- K is for Kangaroo Pouch project
- Q is for Quicksand science experiment
- S is for Scarecrow Color by Shape worksheet
- X is for Xylophone snack
What Should I Search For On Pinterest?
- Search “Letter of the Week A to Z lists” or “letter of the week projects” for both A to Z lists and some specific projects
- Search “Letter _ projects” or “Letter _ activities” for specific letters
photos pictured belong to the sites pinned, which you can see here
Planning Math Concepts
Preschool math is full of things besides numbers. You may not realize it, but things like colors, shapes, and even positional learning (on top of, in between, under, etc.) are related to learning addition and subtraction later on. For our preschool math, we chose to work on a concept for a week or two at a time. You can download that list for free by clicking the link below the photo.
What Should I Search For On Pinterest?
- Simply search for the name of the math concept and “preschool”. For example, you could search for “nonstandard units preschool” for the concept measuring with nonstandard units, or “greater than less than preschool” for teaching greater and less than.
Since I planned these week by week, I just threw all of mine onto a big board called Homeschooling – Math and Counting, but I’d recommend splitting that up into a few smaller, more detailed boards, especially if you’re planning more ahead of time. If not, you can always use the search function to type in the concept you’re looking for and narrow it down to “Just My Pins” to find what you’ve saved as well.
Planning Extras and Unit Studies
As I said above, we focus mainly on letters and math for our preschool. At this age, children learn just as much from free play time as they do from structured learning. But if you want to include other subjects, or your child has shown an interest in a specific topic, you can use Pinterest to plan those as well.
What Should I Search For On Pinterest?
- If you want to add Bible lessons to your preschool day, search for the story name (like “Noah’s Ark”) and “preschool”.
- If you want to plan a unit study on a specific topic, search for the topic name (like ocean animals) and “preschool” to find projects and resources yourself.
- You can also see if someone has already put together a unit study by searching “[topic name] unit study preschool”.
- If you don’t care about the subject as much, but just want someone else to do the work of putting things together, search “preschool unit study” and see what comes up that catches your eye. As of the writing of this post, the first ones that popped up were about dinosaurs, the weather, and farms.
By having an idea of what you’re looking for, you can narrow your search enough to find the things that are specific to what you want to teach your child. Pinterest is a great tool to not only find those resources, but also to save them in an organized way so that they’re easy to find later. And that’s why I teach my children preschool using Pinterest.
This post is not sponsored by Pinterest, and all opinions expressed are my own. I’ve just found it to be a really valuable resource for gathering all of the great ideas in one place!
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