Preparing a child for school can seem like a big task. You’re constantly worried about stressing your child too much, or in the opposite direction, not providing her the stimuli necessary for proper growth. You can make the preshooling task many times easier by following a curriculum. If you’re going to go ahead, here are the features that your own homeschool preschool curriculum should have.
Alphabet Recognition
Alphabet recognition is a vital pre-reading skill for a child to master, before she is introduced to schooling. Learning capital, or uppercase, letters is easier at first, because of the straighter lines, which are easier to comprehend and replicate for a child.
After spending a good amount of time on these, you can start introducing the lowercase alphabet in order to graduate the child’s knowledge. To help a child better connect the corresponding lower-uppercase pairs, you can use descriptive statements like “small brother” or “Big A’s child is small a”. Also, to make the recognition activity fruitful, expose the child equally to written and print letters.
Number Recognition and Counting Skills
Simultaneously, as the child begins to master letter recognition, you should begin to challenge her with numbers. The ten digits are often much easier to memorize than the 24 alphabets.
You can use various learning-oriented games like “color the right number”, “make the number smile”, “Six or Nine”, “Spot the zero in pictures”.
Often related to number comprehension are counting skills, and numbers are better learnt in conjunction with counting. After the child knows how to recognize basic digits, you can piggy-back the skill by associating counting of objects with it. This helps the child in forming visual, and conceptual, associations between the representation of count and counting itself.
Color Recognition
When helping a child learn colors, start by introducing two colors- white and black, then add three more- red, blue, and green. After you’ve given your child sufficient practice with these colors with fun activities, you can start widening her palette with intermediate hues like yellow, orange, yellow, pink, violet, and sky blue.
One activity that stands out above the rest is letting the child play with crayons. The child gets a self-created visual feedback for every color and registers it better in memory.
Free drawing can be gradually promoted to coloring in simple closed shapes, which can then be enhanced with drawing of specific objects. This will also help in training the child’s fine motor skills. Dexterity is necessary for learning to manipulate the pencil (or crayon) with fingers and developing handwriting.
Always remember not to pressurize the child too much and tread gradually. Sometimes, it becomes hard to accept the fact that what’s obvious for adults can be the most difficult thing to comprehend for a child. Other than a proactive approach, fun and action should be the defining characteristics of your self-designed Homeschool Preschool Curriculum.