Preschool Curriculums

Check out the Scholastic ones. We used them at LaPetite when I was an assistant Director there. They were pretty good.

I used the Mailbox ones at my child care center and really liked it.
An example of my schedule:
February
Colors of the month, red, white, pink
Numbers of the month 5, 6, 7, 8

Week 1.
The human heart. My grand-kids still remember the crafts and things we did this particular week and when I ask them about their heart they still know all the answers. Their heart is as big as their hand in a fist and it pumps blood. My friend is a MS Rn and she came in and helped the kids listen to their hearts and took their BP.

Week 2 Valentines day, lots of ideas in the book.
I asked the parents to start telling relatives to mail things to the center in a week or two for an upcoming week, we made lots of valentines crafts and had a party with food and everything out of mailbox booklets.

Week 3
Dental week
We made the mouth box and used yarn to floss the teeth, we made huge toothbrushes to brush them too. We had some friends come in and talk about good mouth cleaning and food good for teeth.

Week 4, the post office.
Relatives and friends started sending mail and we got bombarded. The kids had individual mailboxes left over from valentines day and they loved getting mail every day. This only works if the parents get the family on board. It is devastating if the kids don't get mail for days and days on end.

We even went to the post office on a field trip. With the new regulations since the world trade center bombing you may not be allowed to do this anymore.

So many things I didn't have time for but every craft and story and food fun item came out of the mailbox pre-school curriculum booklets.

If you want a strictly boxed curr...Mother Goose is a good one, but had alot of stuff I would not use (setting up centers, etc were too strictly hard for my physical set up with infants and toddlers..I modified for few months I tried to do theirs. Loved the packed craft projects tho). I generally have a house full of 2 year olds/just turned 3's as my oldest out of 7 or 8 kids..so for a year I did the Funshine line of toddler stuff called Buttercups. Turns out its almost the exact same thing as their main Funshine line (I got some sample months of that)...the craft projects were in many months the exact same thing. The Buttercups line was sold in 3 month (quarterly) increments....and was more of a base for me to work of off which is what I wanted. I did;t have the time to do it all, and this gave me basics and I expanded on it with library books (searched on line, reserved them so I could just go pick them up..easy peasy!)...also found other flannel board and finger plays and songs and the few rare "worksheets" I am willing to introduce (I am mostly opposed to anything worksheet like).

If you want to do your own...the Mailbox has many great resources. I currently use a book called Day by Day preschool plans..very simplistic base and I expand on that. I keep file folders for each theme. I add books, ideas form the many many blogs I find, etc. I print things off and add them to the folder so its all there. I have always sruggled to maintain a simple curr, as I am more a play based philosophy, but I do need some of it. This is working well for me.

A great facebook resourse is Teach Preschool. Fond that and click to "like". Stuff will appear every day in your newsfeed...links to other blogs and their ideas. Its a FANTASTIC resource to get your creative juices flowing..sort of that "why didn't I think of that?", or "Hey, I can do that!" sort of stuff. Alot of home childcares, home school moms with very young kids and some center preschool teachers.

Also Funshine Express boxed curr, Mother Goose Time curr are 2 I liked (you can get free or pay for one month samples to try it out..definately worth it to see if its something you would actually do. Go to their sites . Both I think have research info, sample pages, ordering info, etc.

http://www.mothergoosetime.com/
http://www.funshineexpress.com/

Good luck!

I sell Discovery Toys and although we do not have an "official" curriculum, we do have a lot of products that support a preschoolers development. You can look online at www.ILoveLearningToys.com or msg me and I would be happy to send you a catalog and our fundraiser information on how to get items for free. Plus everything has a lifetime guarantee (even in a center setting.)

I just bought some preschool and prek workbooks at Walmart and ToysRUs. They have dot to dot, thinking skills, writing, math skills and writing letters and numbers. Very cohesive for preschool prep.

gl!

Do you have a Learning Shop in the area? My mom is a preschool teacher and gets a lot of her resources from there.

I have gotten a lot of work books from the Learning Shop, Sam's Club and Target focused in different areas. Of course there is a lot more then workbooks, there are tons of hands on activities to really help enhance the learning process. That is why I would look into a store where teachers actaully shop and get school curriculum from. Maybe ask a local school what they use, you can simple ask the kindergarten teacher "my child is entering kindergarten next year, is there a place you can recommend to get preschool curriculum from."

I taught a class on this at Opening Minds Early Childhood Conference in January. It is SO easy to make your own curriculum! If you want I can email you the info I passed out. I do sell curriculum too, but really it's so easy to just do.