How to Teach a 3 Year Old.

And just like that, the moment that I had been waiting for had finally arrived.... my baby was 3 and it was time for preschool! If you caught my previous post on How To Teach a Toddler, you know that we attempted to use GCP for our 2yo preschool. The curriculum is beautiful and sweet, but it didn't fit our needs. Instead, we started out or 3yo preschool year with My Father's World. Before you get too excited, you should know that we didn't stick with this one either. Maybe I'M the problem? Me and that 3rd baby.. But that's the thing about curriculums, you bring them home, try them on, and move on to something else if they don't fit! MFW is another beautifully made curriculum, I had high hopes that we would stick with it for the long haul. Maybe we will come back to it one day, but for now it didn't mesh well with my newborn, postpartum, always crying 1 year old era.

So we used MFW for a couple months, then I finally threw in the towel around October. We spent October, November, and December doing fun seasonal stuff, hanging with friends and family, and reading.

Sometime in January, I decided that my goal would be to teach Layla all the letters in her name before the end of the school year.... "Layla" 3 letters, surely we could learn 3 letters in 5 months. You see I had been itching to teach her letters since she was like 2 years old. I've read about babies knowing their letters by 18 months! But it just wasn't clicking... I would teach her a letter, then ask her to identify it 2 seconds later, and she would have no idea what I was talking about! So although learning "L", "A", and "Y" in 5 months seems like a low bar, I felt like we were shooting for the moon.

Here's the crazy thing about motherhood, which I'm sure you already know.... these kids will ALWAYS find a way to surprise you. Much to my surprise, once I started teaching her those 3 letters, she started retaining them! She even copied them down on a chalkboard! It turns out that letter identification is much like crawling, walking, and potty training... you can push and practice and stress it as much as you want, but they aren't going to get it until THEY are ready. So here I was, with my letter retaining girl. I knew I needed to capitalize on this, it was time for a new game plan!

I have 4 years of experience teaching first graders, and most first graders already know their letters. So I wasn't sure what the best approach to this was. Do I teach upper and lowercase together? Do I teach letter names or sounds first? If you google it, the advice is mixed. But I guess if there are so many possible "right" ways to do it, there can't be that many "wrong" ways. So I decided to do it the way I thought was best. Capital letters are the obvious starting point because they are easier to differentiate from each other, and easier to write or build. Learning both capital and lowercase at once seems too overwhelming, so we just stuck with one. I did however, realize that knowing letters wouldn't do her any good, if she didn't know the sounds that they stood for. So my new goal was to cover all capital letter names and sounds before the end of the school year. Now that... is shooting for the moon.

We didn't strictly follow a curriculum to do this, we had very little time and I wanted to use the most direct approach I could. We did however, use the Learning Without Tears My First School Book, and a few of their manipulatives. I love the order that they introduce the letters in, and not just because they start with "L". They start with the easiest letters to write and build. And they require very little handwriting practice, which is a plus because these little hands are not ready for a bunch of writing.

The rest of our materials came from Teachers Pay Teachers. We made the cutest book of alphabet crafts from Simply Kinder, and Find the Letter worksheets from ABC's of Literacy. I will share more about how we used all of these resources to learn our alphabet in a separate post.

If you're wondering if we reached our goal, I can happily tell you that we did! Because.... the homeschooler's school year ends whenever they need it to. As I type this, it is August and everyone is starting their new school year. However, WE have just wrapped up our last school year and I'm happy to report that we not only COVERED the entire alphabet and sounds, she CONQUERED it! Ok.... as much as a person who still says that they are a "berry fast swimmer" can conquer it.

Stay tuned for a post detailing what exact materials were used and what a typical daily lesson looked like.