Preschool at home

We started preschool last week. My son is almost four. Why start an official preschool? Well, he's starting to read and normal preschool activities bore him to tears. To start off the week I brought out sponges in the shape of the letters of the alphabet. Let's sponge paint! Nope. He spelled out M-O-M and then wanted to do worksheets. So, we did work sheets.
The second day, we did more worksheets and I read to him from an early reader book. The Now I'm Reading series All About The ABC's is what I'm using to help teach reading. I also use the Preschool Planner from The Mailbox. I also am a subscriber to their Preschool Magazine. It has some really great ideas. It's a magazine/site geared towards teachers with ideas from teachers and education professionals.

I had the first two weeks all planned out with activities and worksheets and themes and letters and numbers and shapes... On day three we began painting the house. No school happened. Day four and five passed by. We took the weekend off. "Off"...as if we had been working so hard...

Yesterday was a holiday, so we celebrated our labor and that of those who came before us and rested. Today we got back into the swing of things.

I bought a dry erase board. I also printed out a list of beginning sight words like "a, at, the". We started today with "the". It took a few tries before he caught on to just looking at "the". He really wanted to recite the words that came after "the", in trying to "read" the story. I wrote "the" on a large index card. I had Eli write "the" on the dry erase board.

My plan for tomorrow is to use another book and have him find "the" in the text.

I'm utilizing phonics, sight words and anything else I can combine into our lessons. Whatever seems to work for him I'll use. He's eager to learn and sucks in information like a sponge.

A couple of years ago I bought a CD-ROM set from Einstein Prep. I'm not sure if they are still in business. I can't seem to access the website. I also saw that the company is on MySpace when I did an internet search for the company, but there hasn't been any activity on the account since 2008. In any case, my son likes the CD-ROM's. The interactive games help him to learn phonics. The first cd has introductory math on it, which he enjoys as well.