Preschool Curriculum

Here I sit... at 1 in the morning... trying to settle on a curriculum for my preschooler. Of course, being the kind of person that doesn't believe that any one way is the right way, I have to go and create my own as a sort of amalgam of a variety of different ones. And what I've learned so far... is that there is an awful lot of stuff to teach these little people! How in the world do kindergarten teachers manage to get everything entrenched in them in just 9 short months?!?! I mean, just looking at true basics, not even taking anything else into consideration, there are 26 upper case and 26 lower case letters. Each letter generally has more than one sound. So to ease reading, they ought to learn the phonetics of each letter, to ease writing they need to learn each letter's look. For lack of time I may have to combine upper AND lower (which I don't really want to do) simply because we would still be at them next summer! The phonetics are harder, I really hesitate to put multiple sounds together in the same week. So for Aa, it'll start with the short sound (apple), but then I'm stumped, should I spend 2 weeks on Aa so that the second she can learn about airplanes?! And for C I was going to use cow or cat, but I don't want to confuse her when we get to kitten (hard C and soft C). Do I start her later in the year on double consonants ch and th or hold that until she's actually in kindergarten, because I really don't remember if that's taught in preschool or not!

You see?! Something that ought to be simple or intuitive is NOT. My respect for teachers has just shot up about a thousand-fold! Because in with the alphabet I have to teach her about colors, shapes, numbers, body parts, music, animals, crafts, and so many more things. I'm exhausted and I've just started trying to put together an overview! I haven't even gotten to specifics yet. Take pity on me. LOL