Ordering curriculum's

[Inspired by Reggio]

Thanks for the giggle Treeholm.

I am cheap and would not 'pay' for something I could easily develop for free .... the Internet is full of free ideas on activities and early learning for children .... and 'boxed curriculum's' for this age group is currently being shown by research done on the preschoolers who've 'lived it' to actually do more harm than good.

Here is Ontario they have just scrapped their entire 'boxed kindergarten curriculum' where every classroom across Ontario for decades has been doing penguins at the same time and so forth in favor of returning to the inquisitive play-based child led curriculum of 25 plus years ago before we got all focused on 'test scores for reading, writing and math and crap' .... the early years are suppose to be about developing 'learning skills' .... aka learning HOW to learn and work both as an individual as well as within a group .... it is not about mastering ABC, 123 and so forth ... they have 20 years of formal education to master 'academics' and the fact that we have pushed children into a 'academic curriculum' has resulted in children getting 'turned off' of learning in the early years and doing WORSE in school instead of better.

I do not do preplanned themes or anything like that ... my children learn through their play as we discuss topics of interest to them ... I set my environment up to stimulate them and add things to it to reinforce phonic letter sounds and literacy so forth and we go out into the community and get exposed to new things there as well and than I come back and add or arrange things into the program based on what they show interest in learning more about based on observations of what they are talking about and asking about ~ costs me very little 'money' in the curriculum but rather focusing my cost on creative art supplies and other 'hands on' learning and all my kids head off to JK 'ready' to thrive with the ability to recognize their own name, print their name because we add our name to art projects, label our belongings and so forth and typcially know most of the letters of the alphabet because they come up in discussions of other friends letters or the interests in Zebras or what not, they count and know their shapes not because we did 'themes' on them but because these concepts come up naturally in our play everyday ~ we count how many grapes we have and how many each of us would get to be 'fair' or we sing songs with numbers in them, they notice concepts out and about and I take advantage of teachable moments to reinforce them.

Save yourself some money ~ preschool curriculum should not cost you $$$ for standardized worksheets or coloring pages around a 'theme' and so forth!