co-op preschool

Tuesday is preschool day. We are involved in a co-op preschool, and it has been exactly what I was looking for in a preschool and exactly the teaching outlet I need (almost- there's a bit too many pee accidents to be the ideal teaching environment). Last summer another teacher mom and I were trying to decide what to do with our kids for this school year as far as preschool was concerned. I toured four schools but wasn’t interested in paying for something that I was pretty sure I could do myself… I just needed other kids. We asked around at church and found a total of 7 kids who would like to be in our co-op preschool. Miss Sarah and I take turns teaching and another mom rotates in as a helper. Someone brings snacks each time. We have had themes for each week with a color, a letter, a shape, or a number as a focus as well. I wanted a preschool that was a lot Montessori, a tad Waldorf, and a bit traditional (since all of these little ones will be going to public school anyway) and found I had to start is myself. Our church lets us meet there, but we can’t call ourselves a preschool or say we are affiliated with them. We meet only 2 hours, one day a week. On another day of the week, we have another one of the moms teach dance class. We did consider hosting co-op preschool at our houses, but decided the cur ch was a more central location and had a nice fenced in playground. They let us have two shelves in the closet and we were set!

Today was a pretty typical day. The theme was forest, the letter(s) were ‘sh’, and the number was 17. We painted hand print forests, played with the forest scene on our felt board, rode bikes, counted out 17 of different items, had snack, had our old lady eat –sh words (sort of like the old lady that ate the fly), and made hand print baa, baa, black ‘sh’eep. Bee and I taught the other kids some signs for forest animals. We danced to our CD (it has Jim Gill, Laurie Bernker, Dr. Jean, Kids in Motion, and a few others) and did some finger plays, felt board poems, and acted out a forest animal skit.

Here are some of my favorite links for ideas for preschool. I often change the animals in the poems to whatever our theme is for that week. I springboard a lot too, I see a craft and then use some of the ideas to form something different. can teach, everything preschool, DLTK, kids crafts, Kaboose, idea box, preschool education, Gayle's, toddler toddler, AHK