Preschool Curriculum Overview

I am so excited to finally be able to share our Preschool curriculum. This preschool curriculum has been taking on a mind of its own over the last year. It has went so many different directions and I can honestly say it has been a labor of love.

While I will be sharing it one theme at a time, I do have everything mapped out for the entire year and I will be sharing an overview with you later on in this post. I am doing this for a couple of reasons. 1. I am constantly tweaking things based on my kids interests and skills at the time and things we need to work on  2. I want to make sure how we have things set up works for us, the kids learning styles, and our schedule. and 3. This type of thing is ALOT of work and while I have been working on this for literally the better part of the last year, I am still a wife and mommy first so there are still parts that need some tweaking and completing to get it exactly how I have envisioned this for so long. I am constantly reading up on child development and have all the early learning standards mapped out. I want to make sure the skills we need to cover are being covered and done so well.

One thing I want to stress before getting into any of the rest of this is that while we will be doing these units during a specific month, these most certainly do NOT have to be completed during that month. If you are stumbling upon this a couple months after we have done a unit or a year after us and want to dive in you most certainly can. Each unit will consist of 20 days of activities that you can use whenever you wish.

We will begin our first unit on Weather and will be testing out the set up of the curriculum. We will be releasing two other units, Dinosaurs and Zoo, during the summer of 2017. These will be set up like all our other units, but we personally will be following a more relaxed preschool schedule with all the craziness and gorgeous days of summer.  Little Miss absolutely loves activities and when I don’t have one prepared she honestly gets upset and requests one until I find something for her, which is why we are continuing our learning through summer.

So without further adieu, I give to you all the details about our Preschool Curriculum.

What age is this curriculum for?

While I created this curriculum for my just turned 3 year old daughter, many of the activities can be adapted and used for 2-5 year olds. Our son is 14 months old and will get to participate in some of the activities as well as some of his very own.

How many days a week are you going to be doing preschool?

The main “meat” of the curriculum is a 3 day plan. Many of the outside the home activities that we participate in weekly or bimonthly happen on Tuesdays and Thursdays so we personally will be setting our primary learning days for Monday, Wednesday, Friday. I do however provide you with an activity or two that can be added into the week on the off days if you choose to extend your learning to 4 or 5 days. We chose to do a 3 day curriculum 1. Because she is merely 3 and it truly is just for fun and is play based. There is no sit down and do this worksheet without moving for 10 minutes type of stuff. and 2. We have outside the house activities we like to do and it makes for a crazy day to try to throw “school” into the mix and 3. Life happens and there are days you just don’t get to everything you wanted to get to. I cannot be the only one where things just don’t go as planned. So we will use Tuesdays and Thursdays as our catch up days in case one of those “life” days happen on MWF. You can certainly do these activities the days that work best for you.

Do I have to have all of the books you use?

No. You most certainly do not have to have the exact same books as we use. While there are some days that are solely based around a specific book, most of them are just general books about that topic and there are so many amazing books that could work. We really wanted to make sure we were finding good quality literature to use with our units and adding a specific book for each day of our curriculum. We also do not want to have to buy a million different books just to get through preschool. While we love books, buying every book you want to use is just not feasible. The library is an amazing place to find books and is where we have borrowed 95% of the books I have looked into for this curriculum. If your library doesn’t have it, check to see if they have a request library where they can request them in from another library. Again most of the ones I wanted needed to be brought in from other libraries. It really is a great system.

What all does the curriculum entail? 

Each month we will be playing and learning about a new theme. Last summer we spent the whole summer learning about and playing with all things ocean animals and it was seriously the best and most fun unit ever and the least stressful because I wasn’t constantly switching up themes. I wanted to bring that fun and adventure back into our preschool curriculum and decided monthly themes sounded like the best way to do that. Some months will consist of subthemes to help celebrate holidays or special days, but for the most part will be one overall theme we focus on.

Our plans consist of 20 days of activities which are 4 full weeks. In our plans for each month, you will find a weekly sensory bin that will be out all week, a daily read aloud suggestion, a literacy activity, a math or science activity, an arts/craft activity, and snack/food suggestions. We will be beginning to learn letter sounds and letter names through fun hands on activities. I wanted to make sure we were beginning to incorporate science activities into our learning so the plan is to have at least one science activity a week. If we are not doing science, during that “time” period we will will do a math activity. Fine and gross motor skills will be incorporated into these activities as well. 

Each month will have a coordinating theme pack full of thematic activities that will be available for purchase in my Teachers Pay Teachers store. Some of the activities in our plans come from these packs and in my plans activity description pages  I state when an activity comes from our preschool theme pack so you know. Any of the activities in the pack that are not on our plans will be made available to Little Miss to do off and on throughout the month.

I will be sharing a look at our schedule and all of the extra things like our Bible time and calendar time routine in the coming days  and will update this post with the link when we do so. 

How do I find all the monthly themes and posts?

Across the top of our site, you will find the tab labeled Preschool. You can click on this tab and it will take you to our Preschool curriculum landing page that will show all of our monthly themes and from there you will be able to find all of the posts associated with that theme. Links will be posted to the page as they are written so it is easier to navigate.

Other Helpful Information

Each theme has it’s very own Pinterest board that will be linked on the planning page every month. We would love to have you follow along. There is no way I could come up with enough ideas on my own to fill our days and so I turn to Pinterest which leads me to so many amazing bloggers who have come up with so many amazing ideas and we will definitely be trying them out for ourselves with some fun original ideas of our own thrown in.

So what are the themes for the year?

Below you will find a pinnable image of all of our themes for the year that will take us the whole way through until next “school” year.

We are really looking forward to this  and would love to have you join along with us. We will be posting our different activities through the week on our instagram page @macntaters_playlearngrow  We will also be using the hashtag #mntpreschool and then a hashtag unique to each theme to keep everything organized. Please feel free to use the hashtags and tag us if you are following along. We would love to see your little ones learning alongside us.