We’ve now completed our first 4 weeks of Bibles Basics for Two Year Olds. We are loving it! I scheduled a break for us this week so I’m going to blog about what we’ve done so far and schedule the posts once a week from now on.
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Kent was 26 months old.
We Started with Bible Songs
The overarching theme for the first 6 weeks of Bible Basics is, “God Made…”. During week 1 we learned that God made Day and Night. The curriculum comes with 2 CDs containing over a hundred Bible and activity songs. I copied the CDs in to my itunes collection. The song titles did not carry over automatically so I entered them manually. It didn’t take very long though, maybe an hour.
The curriculum suggests several songs to play during the “God Made…” units. The teacher’s manual stresses the importance of playing most or all of the same songs from week to week so that these little people can become familiar with them. I normally would have chosen new songs every week but I took their advice and I’m glad I did. As the weeks have gone by Kent has become better and better at the activity songs and I hear him singing the Bible songs to himself occasionally.
I copied the playlist on to my ipod. I have the old school (8 GB?) ipod and it works perfectly for us. I recently found an Amway gift card from our wedding (5 years ago!) and used it to buy this ipod dock for our homeschool. I’ve been very happy with it. I put the Bible songs at the start of the playlist so we did those and then I paused it.
A Special Bible Story
The curriculum includes a little blurb to read that introduces each week’s topic. I didn’t think much of them initially, I figured I could have written up my own pretty easily. However, these little 1-3 paragraph essays are wonderful! They flow nicely and lead to wonderful conversation. Each week’s talk includes a short summary of what we’ve already learned so we can review as we go. The curriculum suggests sitting the teacher’s manual inside the Bible as you read so the children understand that this is fact from the Bible. I decided not to do that.
Activity Songs
After our story and discussion I hit play again and we did the activity songs together. One song says, “This is how an Elephant walks…” and that is Kent’s favorite. He walks all around the house like an elephant now, even when we aren’t doing song time. 😀
Trays
When song time was over I introduced a tray or two and then tried to fade to the background and let him work.
“The Night Ones” was my favorite. I can see us checking it out again when we learn about work and careers. It was all about people that work at night, like janitors, bakers, and doormen. Kent liked most of the books but his favorite were the two on the bottom left about the sun and the moon.
Practical Life
We repeat the same routine each day that we do school (usually 3-4 days a week) except I only read the story on the first day. Kent is loving it so much that on days that we’re too busy to do it he’ll often ask to “do school time”. He hasn’t quite worked out his pronouns yet so instead of saying he wants to do it we hear, “You want to do school time!”. 🙂
If you missed it, you can read more about our very first day of 2 year old preschool (and more about cutting!) in this post.
What are your learning plans for the year? Have you tried any fun, new activities lately?