Cookies and coffee for breakfast while the baby crinkles a piece of aluminum foil and the big boy sleeps. Its a perfect time to squeeze in a quick inventory of supplies.
The curriculum from the school included far more than I imagined it might for this age. I've got several sets of phonics family books, teacher guides, craft idea book, several beginning readers (think along the lines of Sally, Dick, and Jane), a copy book, nature reader, and art flash cards all included in the box. There is a long list of read-alouds (which are available to purchase from this place as a package deal) that I plan to get from the library as I need them. We also own about a quarter of them. Most are well recognized children's classics. All this stuff cost me only shipping because of my connection with my sister at the school but from what I could tell in the catalog, this box is really affordable especially when you consider the cost of preschool for the year. My personal collection already included a solid number of those pre-k workbooks that include letters, numbers, tracing, patterns, and shapes. Several are the wipe off type, which is nice except the pages get dog-eared quickly in his hands and don't last as long as I had hoped.
I'm still undecided about where and how I want to store this curriculum as I want easy access but I don't want it available to baby hands or some things to my son's hands as he seems to think anything spiral bound is fair play for markers. In fact, my handwritten list of library books is partially obscured by a pencil sketch through the middle. I can think about this another time.
Next, I need to inventory my consumable items. This includes paper, pencils, most craft supplies, etc... For myself, I've got wide-ruled spiral bound notebooks to keep track of daily and weekly activities. Most other tracking and scheduling items are digital so I think I'm all set there. I have plenty of items to prepare lessons with.
On the kid side, my craft box overflows with crayons, markers (of the washable variety -I learned the hard way on this one), white glue, scissors, beads, stickers, paper, brads, pipe cleaners, paintbrushes, and paint. I have both washable finger and tempura paints and a nicer set of acrylic paints for more detailed and permanent projects. I still need some glue sticks, paper hole reinforcements (for a suggested craft in the curriculum), pencils with grippers to remind him to hold the pencil properly, yarn, and some other glue-ables like sequins and buttons. I'd like to start remembering to collect items around the house that are good for projects like toilet paper rolls, egg cartons, and jars with lids (oh, where to store them!). We are already doing a lot of crafty things at home so this is going to be a pretty organic addition to the planned side of things.
One of our daily activities will be to mark our calender, discussing the season, month, day of the week, and date. We'll also note the weather. I was originally looking at the gigantic classroom style calenders and finding the designs obnoxious and missing elements I wanted but then I remembered that since I'm teaching a class of one, a regular calender or even a planner would work just as well. I'm leaning toward a spiral bound planner of some sort. This makes it easy to do our work wherever we may need to be for the day and I hope to have him take some ownership of this one particular item. I would like to also find some "weather" stickers, as I think that may be the simplest way to mark the weather for each day. Just a few basic weather items will work just fine and I plan to check the teaching supply store first and go to the internet next.
We have a USA map on the wall in his room already with stars marked on the states that he has been to (incidentally, I also do this for my daughter too) but I would like to also add a World Map to a wall somewhere. A bound atlas may work but I like the idea of him seeing it on the wall every day.
All told, I think I'm adding less than $50 of supplies to my existing stash. I think it may be under $25 but I'm unsure of my planner and sticker costs and I will probably need to refill my printer ink cartridges at some point this year.
This is probably also a good time to put a plug in to my pinterest account, which has lots of kid activity and craft stuff in it: http://www.pinterest.com/kjforce/
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