I originally wrote this post in 2007, when our 6th of 8 was a preschooler. She definitely had the benefit of birth order, getting a solid but realistic preschool year that fully prepared her to start kindergarten in our homeschool. Today she is a 6th grader, a strong math student, and a lover of Nancy Drew books.

And that 9th grader? He's 22. It goes ridiculously fast.

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I'm a bit late on the preschool planning this year. The 9th grader is taking the bulk of my planning time, but the beauty is that once I've planned his, the others will be easier to plan as they hit the grades he's already finished because the skeleton will have been built. I tweak each year to fit the child, so things change a bit; still, the framework tends to remain the same.

Our preschooler this year will be four in December. She's our Beach Babe.

She knows her basic phonics sounds, thanks to Leap Frog Letter Factory, but as I prefer the vertical approach to teaching and learning phonics, we still have phonics to learn. What's a vertical approach to phonics? In a nutshell, it means that all the phonics sounds are taught for each letter as you go, as opposed to a horizontal approach wherein the child learns just the short vowel sounds and one sound per letter, going back to learn a letter's other sounds later. If you want to know more, you can read about it at VerticalPhonics.com.

By way of example, though, the child using the vertical phonics method would learn that the sounds the letter "A" makes are "a" as in "cat", "ay" as in "plate", and "ah" as in "talk".

Our current preschooler is a girl, which tailors some of our choices. Dolls come to mind - my boys weren't much interested in those.

Here are our choices for this year, and in a future post I'll share our daily routine, as well:

Preschool Workbooks

Craft bags, made for her by her big brother

Nursery Rhyme Pockets

DK Children's Illustrated Bible

Lauri Puzzles

Arts and crafts and table activities get rotated every two weeks or little ones get easily bored:

Monday - Clay

Tuesday - Fingerpaints

Wednesday - Wikki Stix

Thursday - Stamps