Secular Home School on a Budget

Home Schooling

We intended for Monkey to start head start this year as another way to curve his behavior (which has gotten MUCH better just since my previous post). He ended up not being able to start, so I decided to start homeschooling him. I know some people think that he's too young for structured lessons, and that he just needs to learn through play... But we all do what we believe is best for our children, and this is the route we've chosen.

After I decided to home school, I started looking for a curriculum for him. While I did find several wonderful resources online (both paid and free), I couldn't find everything I was looking for in one curriculum. It was also very difficult to find one that was secular. So, I did some research and took ideas from several places and developed my own curriculum for him. AND, I'm going to share it with you guys! Awesome, right?

Since I'm breaking down our objectives as I go along I won't have them all ready for you to see at once until May, but you can certainly follow us and use any of our ideas for crafty fun!

3 Year Old CurriculumThese are the things Monkey and I will achieve by the end of this school year:

• Numbers 0-15 (counting and recognition)
• Basic Shapes Recognition
• Basic Color Recognition
• Sorting and Pattern Recognition
• Uppercase & Lower Case Letters (sounds and recognition)
• Able to "read" Pre-School Sight Words (50 Dolch words)
• Recognize, Spell and Write His Own Name
• Trace Lines and Curves by Following Dots
• Use Scissors to Cut a Straight Line
• Memorize Nursery Rhymes and Finger Play

Materials:

I set out to home school without spending a ton of money on supplies, so most of my plans can be done using a few basic school supplies and a library card (we get all of the books we use from the public library here). It has been very cost effective so far! 

For starters, I would purchase the following:

• A pack of Construction Paper (I bought one with several colors) 
• Pre-k scissors (these are springy and much easier for a beginner to use) 
• Glue/Glue Sticks (we use purple glue sticks for everything we do) 
• Jumbo Crayons (easy to hold and NOT easy to break, an 8-pack will do)
• A crafty starter kit (ours has pom-poms, googly eyes, and pipe cleaner in it) 
• Finger Paints (we have an assortment of small pots in different colors) 

Optional Items We Use:

• 1" Binder & Plastic Sleeves (to keep my printed lessons and weekly print-outs in) 
• Day Planner (to write our lessons in for the week) 
• Cork Board & Push Pins (to create a Learning Board where we put our weekly activities, I'll add a tutorial on this later)

Of course, if you do not own a printer, paper, or ink you'll need those things, too. Everything else I'll provide links to in each weekly blog. 

Allons-y!  :-D