Preschool Assessment and the Start of the School Year

I began homeschooling Little Man back in June. I started almost immediately after I pulled him out of his daycare. Things were fine while Princess was still in the hospital. Once she came home, things got a little crazy. With all her appointments and a couple of hospitalizations, schooling became an infrequent event. I began to feel really bad about it. So I prayed about it. I started looking at other homeschooling blogs. Even the preschool ones start their "school year" around this time. I looked at our schedule. Princess has a trip to Stanford coming up in a week. It's going to throw our schooling off again. So after much thought and prayer, I decided to start our school year tomorrow. I have lots of new things I want to do with Little Man and I have been trying to figure out when to introduce them. Well starting our school year with a specific date will be great!

Now, why tomorrow? Well, the school district we are in starts school tomorrow. So I figured that would be a good way to start. And on top of that, with Princess's trip to Stanford next week, we'll cover one letter over the next 5 school days and then have the long 4 day weekend and be able to start the next letter the following Monday.

The first thing I wanted to introduce comes from 1+1+1=1. This is the link to their first calendar. One of the things they did was Make the Date with Coins! Little Man LOVES change, so I thought this would be a good thing for him. I started by seeing if he could sort change by value. He could, so I knew we could expand on this.

Then I saw this post by Milk N' Honey Learn and Grow. She was doing a Daily Learning Notebook with her kiddo. There are a ton of links on there of the things she's putting in her notebook. I found a few that I decided to try with Little Man.

The first was the basic Notebook. It's found at Confessions of a Homeschooler. It's the updated 2013-2014 Notebook. I'm only using some things from it. We're going to use the daily pages and the calendar pages. After I assessed Little Man, I decided to add in the name writing pages and the coloring to 100 page.

The other thing I found was a preschool assessment from Me and Marie. I LOVED this. I had to find a few things like a cutting assessment (from Kids Learning Station) and numbers (from Worksheet Fun). I copied off a sequencing events sheet from one of our books we had. In giving Little Man the assessment, I learned a few things for next time.

1. I'm not happy with the numbers worksheet I found. It had the numbers 1-15 in order. I'm going to try and find one where the numbers are out of order (or make one) to actually see if Little Man recognizes the numbers. (I'm pretty sure he does.)

2. I'm going to print a sequencing sheet of something he isn't familiar with. I copied the first one out of our book, which dealt with planting a seed. He's done this a lot both physically and in other sequencing sheets.

So what things do we need to work on?

1. Writing/Letter/Number Formation -- This has always been my focus with him. He's just starting to get the fine motor skills down to be able to do this better. So I suspect this will come soon, I hope.
2. Months of the Year -- Though I know he learned them at his last preschool, we need to continue on them. I guess I need to find a poster of them to post in our calendar area.
3. Rhyming -- We have just started on this, so I'm sure the more we work on this the better he will become.

I think for me, the scariest thing is all the things he already knows. I'm going to have to start introducing kindergarten ideas here soon. I know for me, I also need to get some preschool science and math ideas going as well. Looks like I have a long night ahead of me tonight to prepare for tomorrow!