One year I had a preschooler, but I didn’t like the preschool options open to us.   A friend called who was in the same situation and suggested that we do a co-op preschool.  To help other families like us, I’ll be sharing ideas for a co-op preschool based on what worked and a few things of what didn’t work for us.  Today I’ll start by telling you how we set up the structure of the preschool.   To start things off, we met at one families’ home and the kids played while the mom’s strategized over how to make our preschool work.   We didn’t need much tweaking throughout the year.  Here’s what we came up with.

  • Call it Preschool — I think it’s important to tell your kid it’s preschool, not just going over to a friend’s house to play.   There are different expectations for school.
  • Set size of group — we ended up with 5 families.  That was the perfect size.  It was enough to get interaction between the kids and small enough for 1 mom to handle.   Some mom’s also babysat a kindergartner or had a baby in the house.   For other moms, the preschooler was the youngest kid.   It was a good mix.
  • Set up rotation schedule — we met Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10am-12pm and rotated between houses.   So each mom was in charge of teaching 1 week out of 5.
  • Set up a class curriculum — there are preschool curriculums out there that you can buy.   We didn’t want to be that structured.   So, we decided to just go through the alphabet week by week.   Each mom was responsible for how that letter was presented. (ideas coming in future weeks)
  • Handouts — each mom created a ‘here’s what we’ll do this week’ sheet for the other moms.  This helped us reinforce what the child was learning in preschool and also helped to decipher some of their activities.
  • Supplies — you could buy and split costs, but since all of us had school-aged children and plenty of school and craft supplies we decided just to use what we had.   If the teacher wanted to use extra materials she was responsible for providing them.   As it turned out, I think we all added about the same amount of extras throughout the year.
  • Rules — we came up with some basic rules for preschool.   Our intent was to have them on a posterboard that rotated between houses, but this didn’t happen.   We didn’t have too much of a problem with disobedient children.
  • Preschool Schedule — each of us followed the same basic schedule.   This helped the kids know what to expect each week. Here’s what we had:
    • Opening Songs: Here We Are Together, Alphabet Song
    • Introduction of the letter
    • Show and Tell — each kid could bring something that started with the letter of the week. This was not mandatory, but most kids brought something each week.   It was fun to see what they thought of (often with the help of mom).
    • Story Time — stories about the letter, or theme of the day
    • Activity — sometimes it was a craft, game, etc. Usually at the kitchen table
    • Snack — small snack. sometimes we were creative enough to have snacks that went with the letter of the alphabet.  More on this in future posts.
    • Play Time — this was just free playtime. Each house had designated areas where the kids could play. Toys were brought out and the kids had a good time.   Kids helped clean up before preschool was over.   When the weather permitted, we were outdoors.

Over the next 7 months or so, I’ll be sharing weekly ideas that we used in our preschool.  Watch for them every Thursday.

Have you done something similar?   If you’ve blogged about it, please share by leaving a comment.

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