Toddler/Preschool Curriculum Chart

Language Arts	Letter play Word building Read a book
Nature Study	Free play outside Identify plants/animals/objects
Math	Counting Shapes & patterns Puzzles
Art	Drawing/coloring/painting Crafts Colors
Music	Singing (folk or children’s songs) Dancing (freestyle!) Listen to the radio/downloaded music or CDs
Foreign Language	Signing Time (1 video per day)
Montessori Activities	Plan 1 activity per day
Narration	Draw attention to connections & details
Habit Training	Help around the house - Mixing, kneading, washing veggies - Picking up and putting away - Sorting laundry - Vacuuming, dusting, wiping - Stacking dishes, setting the table - Weeding the garden Personal care - Brushing teeth & hair - Learning to dress self - Toilet training

We do each "subject" at least once per day. Something like Art or Nature Study will probably happen at least twice a day, but I aim for at least once!

I wanted to put up something easier to understand than my previous curriculum list. If you're looking for a little more detail though, the full list of our toddler/preschool curriculum has it.

Narration is one “subject” that I include only to remind myself that it’s important to me! It fits into the curriculum as a learning tool within other subjects, just as it will later when she’s narrating for me. I draw her attention to connections or details that I see while reading, playing outside, counting, drawing, singing, watching Signing Time, or anything else. For example, if my two-year-old asks me to draw a flower, I might say (after we’re done drawing), “We read a book about flowers this morning! Do you remember your book about flowers? Do you want to read it again?” Then she might say “Yeah! That flower book! Look on the shelf Mama.” We’ll get the book and read a few pages again, admiring the similarities and differences between the flowers we drew and the flowers in the book. Or we might be hunting bugs in the garden, when we find a spider spinning a web. After we’re done studying it and describing it, we might sing The Itsy Bitsy Spider for her baby sister’s entertainment. A book like The Runaway Bunny lends itself to pointing out details. Where is the little bunny hiding on each page? What is the mother bunny doing to find him? I don’t stop reading to point these things out, I just quickly note some little detail on each page and go on if she’s not interested. Sometimes she is and we examine the page in excruciating detail, describing the illustrations to each other (which is awfully like art study too!).

I’ve tried the same thing with my six-year-old nephew to see how an older child might react, and he will have some input for me, and relate the subject at hand to even more things. Sometimes we have a whole discussion that evolves through trains in movies, how trains helped build America, other forms of transportation that are faster or slower than trains, etc, and ends with looking things up online together or finding a book on my shelf.

For Habit Training, I give some specific activities because I’ve read some lists of habits Charlotte thought we should cultivate and asked myself “How do I teach a toddler neatness? What about gentleness?” I think the simplest way is to encourage them to help with these daily chores, show them the proper way to do it, and let them practice (demonstrating and reinforcing the proper way every time). This will hopefully teach how to do the necessary chores, and they can generalize the specific habits as well.

I've gotten a wealth of information from Simply Charlotte Mason's The Early Years Series of blog posts.