Our Weekly Learning “Poster”
I’ve been wanting to introduce Sophie to the alphabets, numbers and colours in a coherent manner for a while now. But I’m so haphazard that I’ll start something and forget about it the next week.
Recently I chanced upon the Letter of the Week curriculum via the Singapore Homeschooling yahoo group and thought I’d try it.
I like it because it has a systematic curriculum for young kids from babies to kindy level. The babies curriculum even introduces a bible verse each week. See… it’s all planned out and idiot proof to follow. It’s got the basics and the haphazard mum me can improvise as we go along. We use Step One – The Preparatory Curriculum.
Every week it introduces
- a new theme e.g this week’s Kitten but I changed it to Cat (oh wells, I wrote cat instead of kitten on the paper so decided to just go with cat. Ha!), and a new vocabulary word (Claws – the word is normally related to the theme),
- a new letter e.g "C",
- a new shape/colour e.g the shape "Diamond",
- a new number e.g. the number "3" and
- a new nursery rhyme.
One thing for each day of the week. With each, there are links to different ideas how to execute the theme/category. I like that coz we can spend a few minutes a day just doing one thing and if we have more time, we can do more things. Very helpful for working mums and mums who have a few kids and of course, "always finding the easy way out" mums like me.
At the end of each day, we’ll refer to the Learning Poster and "show off" to Daddy what we learnt that day before going to bed.
This will go on for 26 weeks. We’ve only done 3 weeks and so far so good. I’m not sure how much of it Sophie is absorbing on the go but she knows that milk comes from cows and baby cows are called calf (The first week’s theme was Cows). That’s not too bad ah? She’s still quite gabra (blur) about the letters and colours but I’m not so worried about that. I figured she’ll eventually get it. Er… hopefully I’ll last 26 weeks. 
September 12th, 2008 at 11:24 am
Hi AiLing,
Thanks for sharing on your blog on this homeschooling curriculum! Hope it’s alright with you that I followed the link and plan to use it at home with my 22 month old – starting next week!
You do such interesting things with Sophie and I’m constantly amazed at how intelligent and lovely your daughter is.
Btw, I’ve been thinking you look very familiar and it recently just struck me that we were in French class together in NUS.
September 12th, 2008 at 11:08 pm
Hello Bliss! Yes! I rem you
It’s been a long time. You know what yesterday I bumped into Christine, also French class NUS, Indian girl? She’s got two kids now.
Thanks for your kind words. Most of the time I really wonder what on earth i’m doing. I guess as long as the kids have fun. I hope your boy enjoys the learning poster too!
Btw, are you a stay home mum or full time working mum?
September 18th, 2008 at 2:27 pm
Am working part-time teaching GP at a JC – I teach only 12 periods a week and have no other responsibilities besides teaching. So Riley goes to childcare when I am at work and I pick him up when I’m done with classes.
Initially, we had a helper at home while I worked worked full-time but that didn’t work out so I resigned to go back to teaching. Hehe.
You’re really great at planning play time and learning activities for your little girl. I’m always very impressed.
I sometimes am quite lazy after work and then my boy and I just play really silly games or just tumble around in bed with no learning at all. ;p
Btw, you remember Iris? She’s got a 3 1/2-year-old girl.