Reading and Math with a Preschooler

Now that David’s approaching 5, I have finally gotten to the point that I’m confident that I’ll be homeschooling him, and I’m looking at various curriculum options for Grade 1 and beyond.

As such, I’ve been signing up for Home School discussion and curriculum lists left, right and center.

I’ve seen a lot of people with three-year-olds ask about curriculum. And while I sure didn’t have a boxed set for David, I can perhaps help out by showing how we got to this point in his haphazard education.

Reading

David picked up the alphabet song, and could recognize most of the upper case letters of the alphabet fairly young. I’m actually not sure where he picked it up. Some sort of osmosis, I suppose. Or maybe the plethora of alphabet books he loved to read.

At some point when he was around 2, I bought the Leapfrog Letter Factory video. After watching it a few times, he’d gotten the sounds of all the letters memorized, and he could recognize most of the lowercase letters too. I gotta tell you, I love that video, because I’m not sure I could have taught letter sounds quite so well so quickly (and without him even realizing he was learning).

I loved it so much, I ran out and bought all the other LeapFrog videos too. But I soon realized that, while they were very entertaining, David just wasn’t up to learning how to put those letter sounds together quite yet. At least not in the way they were teaching.

So, David was content to learn all the two letter words I could feed his little brain, and read them all himself when we would read his books.

Now, I would have been quite content with that, but I had one small problem. I love reading. But so does David. And whenever I’d try to sneak off for an hour to relax with a book, he’d come up with one of his books and ask to be read to.

Without my therapeutic novel time, I was going to go nuts, so I had to find a way to get him to start reading.

A search on the Internet found Headsprout.com. I signed David up, and he would do a lesson or two while I read.

I didn’t push him, though. Even though the site recommends doing a lesson a day, we only did one when David felt like he wanted to. So instead of finishing the first half in less than two months, it took nearly five. But that’s ok, since the first dozen or so lessons got him to a point where he could read a few of his own books along with all the books sent with the package (and the printable ones) that comes when you buy Headsprout’s package.

And, once he’d gotten the idea of how to put sounds together, he was much more interested in reading/writing workbooks too. He especially enjoyed the Reader Rabbit workbooks in this regard too. The Kindergarten book helped him a lot when it came to listening for middle sounds in words, and figuring out how to spell new words, and how to rhyme words. Oh yeah, and he finally learned what there was to learn from those other Leapfrog videos too.

At this point, he can read early reader books, he can sound out words, and he loves going through his kids ‘dictionary’ and writing out new words. We haven’t yet started the last 40 Headsprout episodes, but we likely will begin them soon.

Math

1 through 10 were easy. I think David was doing this before he, or I, even realized it. He learned it on his fingers, by watching TV, counting breakfast cereal. No problem. I think it’s the same with most kids.

David stuck at 20 for a little while, but he loved connect-the-dots books. Once we had bought and finished all the easy connect-the-dots books that stuck to ABCs and numbers below 20, he decided he had to go on.

So, he figured it out. He’d start the connect the dots, then whenever he hit a place where he didn’t know how to continue (which was usually 39, 49, 59, etc), he’d ask me. After asking a few dozen times, he’d figured it out.

It was about the same time he started counting to 100 (for fun, I guess) while he was in the bath.

Learning about addition was another breakfast cereal activity to begin with. “Two cheerios plus two cheerios is how many cheerios?”

When he understood the concept (he was three-ish, I suppose) I bought him an abacus, which he used often. He even wanted me to print off addition problems (with solutions under 10) so that he could figure them out on the abacus. Even with the abacus, though, he hadn’t figured out how to ‘count on’, so he was counting every unit.

That changed when I bought some of the MathStart books by Stuart J. Murphy. David LOVED Jack the Builder, and it was a great introduction to using number lines.

As soon as I showed him how to use a number line, the abacus started gathering dust, and the world of addition and subtraction became larger, since he was only limited by the length of his number line. He begged me for more math books with addition and subtraction problems, and I obliged.

Along with the straight arithmetic of “Power Mathematics for Children“( the Pre K to 2nd CDROM is horrible, but the workbooks are good), David has also been happily going through “Mind Building Math” and “Reader Rabbit Math” workbooks, which focus more on fractions, graphing and patterns.

Writing

At 2, David loved tracing letters. At 3 his uppercase letters were sooooo nice and neat. At 4, his speed is increasing as his printing becomes messier. But I’m not terribly worried. At least his letters are all facing the right way, and he’s practicing by doing. It’ll work itself out in the end.

It took him longer to learn how to write numbers than letters. And he still has to stop and think which way the 3 goes before he writes it or it’ll end up backwards. He’s getting lots of practice, though, so again I’m not worried.

I think…

that in the end, my advice would be to buy many, many workbooks and activity books. Buy some that are below your child’s capabilities, and some that are at, and some that are above, and let her explore. Buy computer games and videos that reinforce old ideas and introduce new ones. And most of all, don’t worry if your child doesn’t pick up on these things right away. This is preschool for goodness sake!

When David hit upon things he didn’t quite get, I just explained it once and abandoned it for a few weeks before I tried again. I found that his little brain seemed to grow just about every seed of an idea that got planted, even if he wasn’t quite ready at the time the seed was dropped.

For the next year we’ll probably just stick to workbooks and winging it. The only problem will be figuring out what level David is at when I decide to move to a more standard curriculum.

Tags: reading, writing, homeschool, preschool, toddler, home school

Test Your Child's Toys for
Lead Using Lead Inspector
Lead Test Kits! Click Here

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 15th, 2007 at 5:46 pm and is filed under Homeschooling, Math, Reading. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.