Preschool After Schooling

As much as I don’t like to admit it, summer is coming to an end. This week Raeca’s kindergarten teacher will be coming for a home visit (cue all the mixed emotions).

I had good intentions of continuing to do some “afterschooling” with Raeca through the summer, but we ended up just soaking up and enjoying the summer as opposed to doing intentional learning (though there definitely was lots of learning happening).

Now that September is a few weeks away we are gearing back up and creating some intentional goals for the next year, even if no one cares about what we do and don’t do, writing this stuff down here is beneficial to me because I know I’m bound to look back at the beginning of next summer. 

Here are a few things we did and didn’t do this summer.

WHAT WE DIDN’T DO

READING LESSONS
I had such good intentions of doing a lesson for each weekday but Raeca hit a wall, she was no longer interested in the book we were using and I didn’t want to push her, she is only four after all. That being said, she has just recently been interested again so we’ve decided to try to do it every other day during the week. Right now we are aiming for Monday, Wednesday and Friday but as soon as she’s in kindergarten we’ll adjust it to the days she’s not in school.

MEMORY VERSES
This is another one that got pushed off, I had high hopes but didn’t follow through very well. We recently picked this up and are starting back with the Lord’s prayer so we’ll be working through that for the next few weeks.

WHAT WE DID DO

SPENT TIME OUTSIDE
I think this was the biggest one for the summer, we just spend our time enjoying the weather and the time we could be outside. We went camping, worked in the garden, went for walks and just generally embraced summer.

DAILY READ ALOUDS
Okay, it might be a tie between this one and spending time outside. We read a lot this summer, we upped our library trips to two a week and between the books Raeca picked out and the ones I had requested for her we went home with 10-20 kids books twice a week.

AUDIOBOOKS
Rae got really into audiobooks this summer. We finished the Little House on the Prarie series in the car earlier in May or June and then she listened to The Mouse and the Motorcycle. After that one I realized that she could use my old iPhone to listen to audiobook downloads from the library and she’s been going hard. She listened to Runaway Ralph, Fortuntately, the Milk (and while the book itself is funny, you must listen to the audiobook, it’s even better), Beezus and Ramona, Ramona the Pest, Ellen Tebbits and All-of-a-Kind Family. She’s obviously on a bit of a Beverly Cleary kick (who I never read at all when I was younger), I’m enjoying finding new books for her to listen to every few days.

SKIP COUNTING
We started skip counting by 10’s and 5’s (I printed this hundred’s chart), we need to work on the 5’s a little more and then we’ll move on to 2’s.

PHONICS GAMES
Since we weren’t doing her reading lessons any more I thought I would trick her into reading by playing some games. This worked amazingly well. I need to remember this in the future. We played a game called Bag the Bug that I pulled from Phonics Pathways and revised the came Starsearch from the same book to make it applicable for us. We’ve also done a little bit of BINGO but I made the mistake of making the words a little hard for her so we’ll revisit that in the near-ish future.

And I think that wraps that up! I am currently working on writing out some goals for the kindergarten school year and will probably share those later in September.

Do you have any good links or resources for this age?
Any audiobook suggestions for an almost-5-year-old?