If you have a 3-year-old at home rest assured, you do not need a curriculum. A few months ago I would have been rolling my eyes hearing I was sharing curriculum picks for my 3-year-old. Heck, I have a blog post draft on here (that I’m glad I never posted!) talking about our plan not to use a formal curriculum. I don’t really even think of 3 as Pre-K considering there is in fact a whole other year PRE-Kindergarten. But it turns out that around 3, my son became very interested in a bit more formal academics. Go figure. We’re not talking sit down and do worksheets academics (though, not going to lie, as much as I don’t, he does enjoy worksheets sometimes) but we are talking about some academics that give us some structure to our day and teach some of those foundational concepts.

If you’ve been around here for a while you likely know my passion for involving children in everyday life, particularly cooking in the kitchen. So naturally I am always thinking of all the ways to incorporate learning there. A big one is math. For reference, my son is 3-years-old.

I started All About Reading Level 1 with my son a few months ago. We flew through level 1 and we are now a decent number of lessons into level 3 (I had to edit that sentence multiple times as I started this blog post a full level ago….). I wanted to share my review and some thoughts on the program. We are definitely unconventional All About Reading (AAR) users so I thought our experience might be helpful to some.

When people find out my son (who is around 3 and a quarter) is reading I naturally get a lot of questions about how I taught him to read so young. But I also think there's a more important first question. Why teach a 3-year-old to read? I do not think 3-year-olds need to be reading and this is why I do not talk about my son’s reading very frequently. This blog post covers the why and how of teaching my son to read at 3.

The first step to reading for all children is developing pre-reading skills. This blog post covers all activities we did before he showed any interest in actual reading and these are activities I would consider developmentally appropriate for many children starting around 2 or 2.5. A child does not need to have any interest in the alphabet to build some of the foundational skills that will be useful when they start to show interest in reading. When I am asked how to introduce the alphabet to a young toddler I generally steer people to instead start here.

My daughter just turned 18 months and has entered into the stage of one of my absolute favorite Montessori activities: matching. I give her small animals for her to match with a photo of the animal. My son loved object to picture matching like this from about 18 months to 2.5. At 3 we still use them to teach new language as part of unit studies.