How We’re Using Timberdoodle & Sonlight w/ Mother Goose Time
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A huge thanks to Experience Early Learning (formerly Mother Goose Time) for providing us with their Experience Preschool curriculum for free in exchange for sharing our honest and authentic stories resulting from our personal experiences. It’s been such a huge blessing to us! As always, my opinions on awesome stuff for little kids are 100% my own.
Not too long ago, I mentioned giving y’all an overview of a typical day using Timberdoodle & Sonlight w/ Mother Goose Time, so here it goes.
Keep in mind that all preschoolers do things in their own time and on their own terms. What one is ready for, another might not be. Please use your best mama judgement when planning activities for your little kids.
Are you ready for a confession, though? We are absolutely head over heels in love with Mother Goose Time. Ditto with Timberdoodle. And of course Sonlight too. So much so that we ended up with all three.
Now that we have that out of the way, let’s get to it. Today was the first day of our Me & My Family theme with Mother Goose Time. Each month, we get a little yellow school bus box filled with all kinds of fun stuff that relates to the monthly theme.
We start and end most days with a book. Sometimes, it’s a Sonlight book and sometimes it’s not. The Family-Time Bible in Pictures just happens to be the little guy’s favorite. It was part of Sonlight P 3/4. We also use 100 Bible Stories, 100 Bible Songs.
We started this so incredibly young that we’ve been adding lots of other books too.
I look at Sonlight P 3/4 as an awesome list of books to read over and over again. Heck, there isn’t even an Instructor’s Guide. Instead you get what they call a “Parent’s Companion” with a checklist and lots of ideas for activities.
I may or may not have told my husband that even if we decided not to homeschool long-term, I’ll still be getting stuff from Timberdoodle + Sonlight. So many of the books, puzzles, and games from these two companies would make awesome birthday and/or Christmas presents.
And it’s definitely worth mentioning that I love each of these curriculum kits for totally different reasons. Mother Goose Time because it’s play-based, Timberdoodle for it’s emphasis on STEM, and Sonlight because of all the awesome literature.
Next on our list was Plus Plus Midi, which is part of Timberdoodle Preschool. We’ve been taking a sort of unschooling approach to this. I have all of our Timberdoodle books, games, and puzzles on the little guy’s shelves and he gets to choose what we do each day. No stress. No schedule.
This is Preschool, y’all! My goal is to create a love of learning. I’m not particularly worried about skills or standards. Although side note: Mother Goose Time is aligned with PA’s Pre-Kindergarten standards, so there’s that. But we’ve definitely got a while yet before we even have to worry about it.
We spent some time exploring letters. I about fell over when the little guy held up a letter and told me what it was. So awesome!
If you’re friends with me on Facebook, you probably saw the video of the little guy introducing the letter A. It was so cute! It just so happens that it was also our letter of the week for Mother Goose Time, so… How cool is that?
He was so proud of himself for finding the A and of course for telling me what it was and pointing it out on our circle time display. Way to go, little guy!
While I was getting his “invitation to create” set up, he looked at Montessori Number Work. These books have been more than worth the money. We read them together all the time and the little guy looks at them over and over again.
I’m definitely all about the tracing aspect of the Montessori books too. Each number has a slight texture, so you can trace over it with your finger. Say it, trace it, and then count it.
I put together this fun “invitation to create” for the little guy to introduce our theme for this month. He loves art, so I figured he’d be all about these awesome family stamps that came in our Mother Goose Time curriculum kit.
He cut and stamped and colored for I can’t even tell you how long.
Most days we do a total of three activities from our Teacher Guide. If you’re interested, you can find lots more examples of how we’re making Mother Goose Time work for us here.
Oh, and he stamped himself too. I’m not entirely sure how he managed to pull it off, but… You know how it goes. Lol…
Don’t forget to stop by next week if you’re interested in seeing what we’re up to with preschool homeschool!