Ocean Unit-Planning and Preparation

In the last couple of weeks I have had about 10 emails from friends and family asking about certain aspects of homeschooling or what I am doing in terms of activities with the girls. A lot of questions seemed to revolve around specifically how I structure our time and what our day looks like. I thought one of the best things I could do was share an entire unit - from preparation to completion- and how I execute it. Hopefully this can help some of you who have asked questions and give you ideas. If you have anything to add, please let me know, I always love to hear ideas!

Day structure: One thing I want to say is that we are highly structured in terms of activities so that I can make sure we can fit all dance, play time, errands, etc. in with school too. I plan for school on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings from when I can get the girls ready (usually around 9:00 am) until nap time (noon). I don't plan any errands or appointments during this time so I can be sure that school happens. Because we have so many activities and 4 schedules to work around, I have found (for us) that I definitely must keep this on the calendar and make sure that it is a priority in terms of time.

Room structure: Another question I was asked was about how I am able to do so many activities during school time. The answer is that I have a space dedicated to school and all of the supplies are organized and easy to get out for activities. Before we moved part of the difficulty of homeschooling (for me) was that doing an activity just took so much time from start to finish. Most of that time was preparation and putting stuff away. Now that it is all out, I can easily move from one thing to another to make sure the kids are always doing something fun and interesting with little work on my part- leaving me open to work with them.

Planning stage: When I am first doing a unit, I start off by asking what the kids are interested in.  For this unit, I gave them three choices: dinosaurs, ocean, or rain forest. They chose the ocean.

The next thing I did was spend about an hour on Pinterest getting ideas and free printables. My search included "preschool ocean activities" and "free preschool ocean printables". I got a lot of activities and ideas, and I laid them all out on my table. 

Next, I sorted them by how long I thought each activity would take. I went through my Kitchen Table Play and Learn book and picked each activity I wanted to use as well as through Mudpies to Magnets and the Busy Book, all of which I have mentioned in more detail here.  With all my lessons in place, I divided up the lessons into approximate days so I could easily grab what I needed when I needed it.

Next I went to the dollar store to get additional supplies for the activities I planned. I LOVE the dollar store and get almost all our supplies there. I spent $13.00 and got things that weren't even for school. That is the extent of our cost, everything else was free on the Internet.

Next, I made a sensory ocean word wall while the girls were napping.  I didn't want to tape a lot of stuff my my walls, so I taped a dollar store tablecloth to the wall and then taped everything else to that. The girls love this wall! They like to touch all the curly ribbon, crepe paper, and beads (mardi gras beads from the dollar store cut to make a long string), as well as point to all the pictures and name the animals.

I also made a trip to the library for tons of books about the ocean and I was ready to roll! In total, it was a couple hours of work for a couple weeks worth of lessons.

This is all I do for planning, the rest I usually wing during the day. In following posts I will talk about how each day is structured as we go through it.