Preschool Homeschooling the CF Way - Introduction

One of Olivia's current treatments for Cystic Fibrosis is Pulmozyme which requires the use of a nebulizer machine. This makes the particles of medicine small enough for Olivia to breath into her lungs. The Pulmozyme works by thinning the mucous and making it easier for her to expel from her lungs. The nebulizer takes about 15 minutes to run. About two weeks ago, I order a nebulizer strap from an Etsy store ( marie's stuff ) to use with her "Bubbles the Fish" mask. Once we received the strap Olivia was able to move around a little bit more since the mask didn't fall off as easily. So Olivia and I started doing jigsaw puzzles during that time That got me to thinking this would be a good time to get a little bit of "learning" in. I started planning some homeschool projects/lessons that didn't require a lot of movement and could be done in short "bursts" over several days per project/lesson.

I started thinking about the fact that I haven't used the blog in a while since I moved Olivia's health updates on to a Facebook group and decided to use it to document our mini homeschool sessions.

Right now I'm going to do some quick outlines of our sessions, but will be editing the posts later to add pictures and links to the materials or programs I am using.

One of the things, I decide to do was to NOT go through the alphabet in order. We started with the letter A and the second letter will be M. One of the reasons for this is to help improve random letter recognition. Another thing I decide to do was to use multiple subjects for each letter. This was so that she would understand that "A was for ..." not only apple, but also ant, astronaut, Alice, arrow, ambulance, etc.

I'm trying to incorporate various skills into the overall lessons. Most likely not all in one session, but over the length of the lesson. Some of the skills we will be working on will be: pre-writing motor skills, cutting skills, counting and number recognition, letter recognition and sounds, beginning phonics, sight words, jigsaw puzzles, shape recognition, color recognition, different/same, and more.

I plan on using a lapbook setup for the main part of our lessons. This way we can go back and review later and so we can play the games in the lapbook whenever we want.