Hi Jen, I have a 3-1/2 year old daughter and a son 13mths. I've started k4 with the oldest this year. (I'm a little excited about homeschooling too) First off, this may help you, I found a great resource in www.trainupchildren.com. It's a search engine of homeschool related websites. If you are looking for curriculum it’s the place to go. In fact, I found this phonics curriculum from searching there, it's called "How to Teach Reading" by C. Stroh. (www.howtoteachreading.com) What I'm doing is using her lessons and adding to it. For example, At this point we are working with the vowels. We listen to the curriculum's pronunciation tape and point to the picture on the worksheet. Then we go around our house to find as many items that are on the worksheet as we can. For the letter A, we found such things as albums, apple, antlers, ant, etc. After we finish our scavenger hunt, my little girl will then write the letter "A" on pre-dotted worksheet that I created from my computer. Plus, to twist things around, I'll get her to act as if she was the teacher on the tape and I'll point to the pictures as she tells me the words. We've been doing this for 3wks now, and her vocabulary has grown. We're having fun, and she learning without getting bored. Hope this helps... Teaching2
Teaching2, that reminds me of a book I've used before. Its called "The Complete Letter Book: Multisensory Activities for Teaching Sounds and Letters" by Michele Borba and Dan Ungaro. One thing you do is to make a giant letter and then glue things on it...for example, macaroni all over your M, sand all over the S, beans on your B. It is also big on sorting and graphing. Buttons for B, Jellybeans for J, nuts for N, etc. It also has various art activites...cutting out a bear for B and giving it button eyes and a bow, for example.
I get most of my curriculum at Coas bookstore (used Books) http://www.coasbooks.com/ I don't know if their online store has stuff like the offline store has but I get everything really cheap... I got saxon math for $3 as an example. I wouldn't be able to afford to homeschool without Coas.
