TOS Crew Review: Ideal Curriculum - Early Learning

Wow! This is a very complete curriculum for early learning that is extraordinarily complete.  This is an all in one curriculum in that everything you need is included in your purchase.  These are available for purchase in monthly units as digital download and eventually in print.

What is great is that this curriculum can be used either in a relaxed manner or with a more structured routine.

From the Ideal Curriculum Website:

All of our products are based on current research. They are based on music and games, so they are designed to be used for individual children and small groups as well as in classroom situations.


•Letters and sounds- Learn letters very fluently; upper and lower case, quickly and accurately, recognize letters from different fonts and sizes


•Learn basic sight words- There are about 30 level one sight words that provide the foundation for reading and writing. There are about 100 sight words that build reading fluency.


•Exploring the ability to write- Develop motor skills and hand strength, gain a concept of themselves as a writer, learn to write their own name, learn to write the letters and move into writing sentences and stories.


•Be able to hear, recognize and manipulate sounds of language- Develop skills in rhyming, breaking sentences into words, breaking words into syllables, breaking syllables into onset and rime, breaking words into individual sounds or phonemes and blending them back together


•Oral language and vocabulary- expanding their vocabulary, understanding concepts, increasing their ability to express themselves using higher level language structure.


•Science and social studies- Developing concepts of how the world works.


•Math- Build and use a mental number line, master rote counting (counting in order, forwards and backwards), one to one correspondence (be able to touch and count pennies or m&m’s), cardinality (how many), adjacent values (what is next to 7? 6&8), basic Shapes, number recognition.


•Calendar- Learn basics of scheduling and remembering and learn parts of the calendar .

This program, like I said is complete.  It comes with the audios, which we found to be very fun tunes children like to sing along with. Each audio teaches a specific goal set out in the program and enhances it. The author recommends doing an assessment before starting the program to see where they are at.

They include teachers manuals for Science, Literature, and Math. For all three the activities are broken up by week. For Math and Science it is by week only.  Where the literature one is done by day. Several activities are repeated over the week to help with retention and as not to overwhelm the student with too much information for this age level. Activities include dramatic play, experiments, shared writing, and more.

The student pages are full color.  There are printable pages and reading pages all done in full color.  You will probably want to print out the read aloud books.  The one I have includes "Print it is all around us." Which is a neat story which points out print in all forms that we may come across through out the day, helping us to see why learning to read is necessary.

I love that this can be as formal as informal as you would like. This is a little more formal then I like, but easily adaptable to fit all styles.

 Units are purchased by the month and will soon be available to purchase as a hard copy verses downloadable form now available, for an additional cost.

To learn more or to purchase, visit: http://www.idealcurriculum.com/
There is lots of good reading on the website!!!