...were, in a nutshell, unstructured.


I had ALL these great ideas from Pinterest, Etsy, and my own brain and I didn't really have a plan. Tons of crafts, so many sensory bins, math games, songs... you name it. The problem was that I wanted to do all these cool things RIGHT NOW and my expectations for everything were way too high. That being said, we did do a ton of fun things the first couple of weeks!

Here's what I learned:


So I very quickly figured out that I actually needed a structure. I had been thinking "This will be such a fun change for Conall from his typical preschool day! We can do whatever, whenever, and it'll always be new and exciting!" What I quickly learned was that he (and Nora, and probably most littles) love when they know what to expect. After the first day of singing a song about the weather, they were always ready for the same song the following days. They wanted to sit in their chairs when we talked about the calendar and our plans for the day, and the liked to sit on squares on the carpet when I read a book. They seemed to thrive with predictability!


Down to the basics:


After the first week or so, I realized that I needed to simplify my daily expectations by a LOT. I decided that each school day just needed part of each of these activities:

  • Some sort of math practice - counting out loud, recognizing numbers, 1-1 item counting, ten frames, less/more, bigger/smaller - one of those per day was plenty
  • Some sort of alphabet practice - matching uppercase + lowercase, writing letters, letter sounds, finding items that begin with a specific letter - again, one of those per day was plenty.
  • Fine motor skills - stringing beads, picking up toys with tweezers, anything with clothespins, legos, clay
  • A picture book - they loved the routine of story time as much as they loved the story itself. Each day they would decide who got to be my page turner. I would ask Conall (Nora's wasn't quite there yet) to summarize the story when we were done, to help with his comprehension, cause and effect, and so much more. And, it meant I could purchase tons of books on Amazon :)
  • Writing - having a third grader who still has terrible handwriting (that's a whole different blog lol) I'm particularly determined to get these little two comfortable with a pencil. Every day they write/trace their name with different writing utensils and different mediums. Dry erase boards, chalk boards, markers, sand, etc.
  • Life skills - it can be as simple as Clorox-wiping the door handles, or cutting up a banana. Most of it also works on motor skills. And, chores!
  • Arts + Crafts - Painting, Coloring/drawing, or just gluing pieces of scrap paper onto construction paper. Simple as that.
  • "Something else" - this was basically play time but I'd call it school for a confidence boost! Sometimes we would watch a YouTube video about how flowers grow, or we would learn about a specific animal, or I would show them a virtual tour of the zoo or aquarium.


The best part? So many of these "lessons" could be combined! "Count out ten beads for this bracelet, and count out 5 beads for the other bracelet!" meant that math and fine motor practice could both be checked off for the day! I figured if I did at least something from each category, that would likely make up what they'd do in an entire day at preschool.