My Home Preschool Curriculum for Two Year Olds!

I have searched the internet looking for a free or very low cost curriculum that is age appropriate for two year olds.  I am not at all concerned about her learning anything academic right now, but since I am home with her I wanted to start doing something constructive.  I have not found anything out there that is truly age appropriate for two year olds.  So, I have started making up and writing my own curriculum that is fairly simple yet gives us the structure that I have been looking for.


The Plan
I do preschool with Joelle and another toddler that I babysit.  We do preschool one afternoon a week.  We do not follow a schedule, but I make sure that we do everything I have planned during that afternoon.  I have based my curriculum off of a simple outline that involves these five things:  sensory play, craft activity, songs, stories, and games.  My themes for September/October are: apples, leaves, pumpkins, the colors red and orange, and the shape circle.  I loosly base my activities around these themes.   

Sensory Play
For sensory play we do things like bubbles, play dough, playing with the fall sensory bin, playing in water, etc.  I think the options for this are pretty endless.  It just depends on how creative I am feeling and how much energy I have to handle the mess! 





This week I made a rice tub with small red objects in it, since we are learning about the color red right now.  The kids LOVED playing in this, digging with spoons and pouring with cups.  I had a bunch of small plastic ladybugs that were perfect for this, along with some plastic bracelets and rings, and some red sparkly pom poms.  I think I will try to do a color tub like this to go along with each new color we learn. 

 

Craft Activity
All of our crafts are open-ended crafts that have no end result in mind.  They simply involve gluing something onto a peice of paper to make a collage, painting, coloring, or putting stickers on paper, etc.  I have been repeatedly frustrated with sites that suggest art projects for two year olds that are more complex.  At this age, I have found that anything more than a one-step project is too much to expect.




This week we did a fall leaf craft, gluing paper leaves on a paper tree.  This was a free craft from the DLKT Kids website, all ready to go if you have color ink.  I just had to cut out the leaves.  Joelle loved gluing!  We used a glue stick and she learned pretty fast how to glue the leaves herself.  She was really enjoying this craft!

 

Songs
For our songs, I have found five or six that are seasonal.  There are some songs about apples, leaves, and pumpkins.  I also use props with these songs, such as fake apples and fake leaves.  We drop the apples when singing songs about apples falling from the apple tree, and then make a game of picking them all up again and putting them back into the bucket.  We do the same type of thing with the leaves- we throw them around when singing songs about leaves falling from the trees.  The kids LOVE these activities.  I plan to do a variation of this type of thing for each season.




Tossing the leaves during our leaf songs!

 

In addition to our seasonal songs, every week I will plan on singing two or three other common kids songs.  We will do a lot of songs that involve actions.  I also save the handouts from library story time each week and we often sing those songs during our song time.  In addition to all that, I have a large collection of felt sets that I got very cheaply at a yard sale, as well as some that was given to me from my mom that I use a lot.  I have the sets for five little ducks, five speckeled frogs, and five little monkeys, as well as a lot more that can be used for other songs.  So, every week we will do something with felt during our song time.




Here we were doing Old MacDonald Had a Farm with the felt set.  The kids really enjoyed playing with this!

Stories
For story time I have also planned to go with a seasonal theme for the fall.  I have checked out books from the library about pumpkins, apples, and leaves.  We also got books about colors and shapes.  I put them all in one big basket and these are the books that we read during our preschool storytime.  We read them a lot at other times too.  One thing that surprises me is that Joelle is into the books that I might have thought would be over her head.  She enjoys them for the sake of the pictures, and we make up stories to go with them if there are too many words in the book.  We have a large collection of seasonal books that we are borrowing from the library for our fall preschool time.   

Games
For games, I make things up based on the materials I have.  Last week we worked on throwing bean bags into a bucket.  We have also been using our red bag a lot lately- playing with the toys and objects in it and naming things.  One day we played with magnets on the fridge.  Our games may just mean planned time for me to play with the kids with blocks or some other open ended toy, focusing on their skills and learning new skills.  I am going to focus on planning fine motor activities, gross motor activities, language development activities, etc. 

Playing with straws for one of our games



This is a game I made up using shiny little acrylic pumpkins.  I gave the kids a cardboard tube to put them down along with some bowls and spoons.  They ended up experimenting in many different ways.  This kept them busy for quite awhile. 

So, that is the breakdown of my home preschool curriculum for two year olds.  It is just the right amount of content to keep us busy and not more than we can handle.  We have plenty of other activities going on during the week- library story time, Truth Town Tuesdays (where Joelle enjoys a free preschool class while I am getting paid to babysit), music class with Janellybean, and Together for Children playgroup to name a few.  I feel our life is very full of enriching activities and so I am not going to spend a lot of time doing this.  But, we do enjoy our preschool time one afternoon a week and I'm excited about this year because I do love to plan these things and do some fun things with my Sweet Pea!