Piper's first day of preschool - homeschool style!

I should preface this by saying I am using the term "preschool" very loosely here. It is no secret that Mitchell and I are seriously considering homeschooling Piper (and any future children, should we decide to have more). That said, several people have been asking me about preschool lately. Where we're going to send her, if I've begun looking in to it, etc. The answer is no, not really. I've checked out a few websites for local preschools, read what they had to offer, and noticed the price (ouch!) but haven't seriously considered it. 

Today, we are starting a very loosely structured preschool curriculum that I have been hearing about for a few years now. I didn't want anything too intense and I wanted it to be primarily literature and play-based. That's exactly why I chose to start with the Letter of the Week Preparatory Curriculum. It is such an amazing resource - it has everything completely laid out for you ... for free!

I finished up my "learning poster" that we will be using each day this weekend. It's nothing fancy but it cost exactly $.69 + printer paper to make, so I'm good with the imperfections. ;) The theme changes each week as do the letters/numbers/vocab words/etc. Here's Piper pointing out the cow on the poster:

I also checked out five cow books from our local library and we will be reading those each day to supplement the daily activity and learning poster review. I was disappointed to learn that our local library will only issue five books at a time so I may have to check in to surrounding libraries and their limits. Piper loves to read books so I would prefer to be able to check out more than five per week!

I found a cow coloring page for her to color with her new markers:

And when she was finished coloring the cow very, VERY well, she rushed to the fridge to display it proudly. It's a little hard to tell, but there IS a cow under all that marker! :) She loves to color, and she colors pictures every day - but this is the first time I've brought out the markers so that was exciting for her.

I have a couple of short videos for her to watch, a couple of fun little craft projects, and a trip to see the cattle drive in Fort Worth one day this week also (in addition to the daily review and reading). She really had fun with our first day/lesson and I look forward to continuing this for the next 26 weeks! :) I will probably take a few weeks "off" of the curriculum to make up my own themes - for Christmas, Thanksgiving, Valentine's Day, etc. but the beauty of something like this is that it's flexible! I can mix it up however we prefer and it doesn't matter a bit.

Piper loves to learn and absorbs things like a sponge so I figured introducing a little more structure to our day-to-day routine would be a good thing. I'll be sure to update on how things are going in the coming weeks and months!