Preschool at Home - Planning Ahead!

When I was a teenager I babysat for some kids whose neighbor was homeschooled.  When he would come to play I would ask him all about his days learning at home with his mom.  I was fascinated!  That was the first time I had ever heard of homeschooling as a concept and I made some mental notes and tucked them away in the recesses of my brain, thinking maybe when I had kids I would do the same.

Homeschooling has been something that I have read about online from time to time over the years.  I followed a few homeschoolers blogs and always loved seeing what they were doing with their kids.  I knew I would want to share in my children's learning in a bigger way than I would if they went to traditional school.  I even mentioned it in our adoption profile book in my "letter to birth mother." I was somewhat hesitant to do so because I didn't want to scare off any potential birth mothers, but by the time we were on the road to becoming parents homeschooling was on my mind a lot.

There is more to it than this, but to keep things short for now I will just say that we have "officially" made the decision to do preschool at home for our twins.  I am also really hoping to do kindergarten as well and then take it year by year after that.  There are a lot of unknowns at this point, obviously.

Despite all of the unknowns and being a planner by nature I have been researching curriculums and methods for a long time now and have started making some decisions.

Here is the gist of what I am planning so far for tot school and preschool.  Let me add some links...

Tot School - This is where I found the concept and a lot of ideas for tot school
Tot Trays - You can read more about tot trays here.
Before Five in a Row Curriculum - I am super excited about this literature based curriculum.
Sonlight P3/4 - Another literature based curriculum, I will be mostly using this one for read alouds.
Letter of the Week - From Confessions of a Homeschooler.  When I add it LOTW, this is what I will be using.
All About Reading - Pre-Reading - I have read such great things about this program and will be adding it in when my kids are 3 and a half. (tentatively)
We Choose Virtues - Character development

Although I am pretty sure about the curriculum I have chosen, I am VERY open to adjusting start and finish dates and following my kids leads.  When the time comes, if they don't seem ready we will push things back.  My main goals with preschool is to increase their attention spans for books (which is already very good, yay!) Develop their fine motor skills, get them outside as much as possible and expose them through experiences to as much as I can.  It is very important to me that the kids just PLAY as much as possible and have lots of sensory experiences, that will be unstructured and comprise the bulk of our day.

In my ever expanding need to plan I also planned out curriculum choices for their K4 year.  I will post that soon.

Any questions, feel free to comment or reach out on my facebook page.