Smith-School: Five in a Row

I love the idea of using great literature as the foundation of our early years. When I look back on my life, I see that living books had a huge impact on me as a child. In those early years, the best thing to establish in a child is a delight in stories and language. Once you can read, a wealth of potential knowledge opens up to you. 

Today I wanted to dive into the curriculum that I'm pretty set on using for Tot School (ages 2-4) and why I'm so excited about it. Five in a Row, and it's beginning volume Before Five in a Row, is based around reading the same book for five days in a row and doing complementary activities. The books are carefully selected from the best of children's literature and the Teacher's Guide maps out partner activities to further explore the book each day. 

The Unplugged Family has three children and has a fantastic review of their many years spent using Five in a Row. She made a top 5 reasons that the program is right for you, which just thrilled me because it put into words all the reasons that I was so attracted to it.

Five Reasons to definitely USE Five in a Row:

1. You love literature and want to spend a lot of time reading with your children and building your family's love of reading.
2. You don't mind planning your days and organizing materials and activities, even if it takes some time.
3. You want a more eclectic, hands-on, Charlotte Mason-ish style homeschool experience.
4. You would like your family to learn together (mixing different ages/learning levels).
5. You desire for your learning experiences to be fun, memory making times together.

One benefit of FIAR being such a popular curriculum is the huge number of resources out there where real moms show the lesson add-ons that they used for each book. There are link-ups so whatever book you're planning to row that week, you can quickly browse other examples, choose your favorites and plan them in. 

I've already started collecting the books for Before Five in a Row and I really feel like basing our Tot School on fantastic, quality literature is going to be the way to go. I can't wait to start building our lapbooks (like scrapbooks where children store all their work and go-alongs from their lessons), exploring great books, and cuddling up to learn about the world together.

One of the best parts is that you can "row" a book for shorter or longer depending on how your family embraces that particular book. Then, for subsequent kiddos, the books are so rich that you can row a book again and just choose different partner activities to keep it fresh for an older child. That means that children of different ages can still be learning together, which helps maintains that community vibe that I want, and it leaves me with room to be creative to meet everyone's needs and interests. 

Have you ever considered homeschooling your kiddos?