Beautiful Books Preschool

Beautiful Books Preschool is a series of lesson plans that I have designed for my 3 year old son using classic children's books, fairy tales, nursery rhymes, and family favorites from modern children's literature.

I am patterning Beautiful Books Preschool after the Five in a Row concept where you read the same book over and over in a week pulling out different concepts and activities from it. I loved the concept because of how important repetition is to this age, the fact that we can let classics sink in deep, and that I don't have to run around every day trying to come up with a novel themes and materials. (It's also a bonus that I can utilize my overabundant personal library!) The reason I am creating my own lesson plans is because I want to customize the skills practiced and books chosen with what works for our family and keep it low key as an intro to "Lessons" (that he is eager to have after watching his big brother do kindergarten.)

This level of preschool is designed for my 3 year old. When he reaches age 4  we will start with Logic of English level A if he is ready. If not, we will continue on in pre-reading concepts that do not include learning phonograms or writing letters. The lessons are a gentle introduction to learning and are not heavy on Pre-K Skills but lay the foundation for reading and math in playful and comforting ways.

In each of my lessons below you will see a link to purchase the book on Amazon, a copy of materials I used (or a link to the blog post I got them from), and what skills or character traits we took from each reading. As I make new posts I will add them to this directory and if you have any questions or suggestions feel free to add a comment to the post.

Enjoy!

20 Big Trucks in the Middle of Our Street    

 We're Going on a Bear Hunt

Painting Chickadee Eggs

Dodge and I had a great time painting chickadee eggs together the other night. He was endlessly fascinated by flicking the paint on the eggs with a tooth brush. Being a perfectionist it drove him a little crazy not having control but it was fun one on one time after the littles went to bed. We used the materials and activity card 1 from our Nature Study Cards Bird Set #1, cream paint, brown paint, a tooth brush, and small brushes.

He really liked taking video of me flicking the paint and you if you could hear his expressions "uh huh, ooo, yeah..." you'd see he was really focused on learning to do it himself.

That seemed to be the theme of the night actually:

I just love seeing him learn new skills. It's amazing what you learn about somebody just by being with them and I love getting to see my boys shine the way they do only when we are one on one.

I bet James would have loved this one too though so I'll have to have him join in on more of our activities. He sure got a kick out of measuring wingspans (activity from bird set #2) when he heard that he had the same "wingspan" as a duck he started quacking and giggling.
Man I love these boys!