The Gentle + Classical Preschool Bundle

I ordered this so my little one could tag along with my Kindergartener, and I've been encouraged to see that the content of both the Preschool and the Primer work well alongside one another. I lean more heavily on the Primer, but we are using the picture book schedule from Preschool for both, and we just double up on the nursery rhymes, catechism, memory verses, etc. The print quality is BEAUTIFUL! I'm very tactile, so having high quality prints of everything made me really excited to use it. So far, my kids are enjoying the content thoroughly. The Morning Binder is especially helpful, and works synergistically with the Primer one.

We have been using this preschool curriculum with my almost 4-year-old since the first week of July! We just finished Term 1, and I am impressed by how much she has learned. She knew her colors, shapes, letters, and numbers before starting, but the repetition has been excellent for her, and she's retained so much from the rest. I especially love the scripture and catechism memory statements! If you are looking for a relaxed, yet structured preschool curriculum - this is it! Love the Charlotte Mason/Classical approach. Perfect for me and my little one!

This is my first time homeschooling and I understand and appreciate the layout and organization of the materials over all. I love the teacher guide and handicraft guide, but wonder if it could have been somehow fit in to one guide overall.

I found the first book of the series, Last Stop on Market Street, to be too adult for my 3 year old, I’m glad I previewed it because even though he is extremely articulate, he wouldn’t understand and as a sensitive kid it would make him feel bad.

I found it annoying that the morning menu pages were printed with L on the front of the page and M on the back while another page had K on the front and L on the back, so you have to stick M and K together so you have one full L page in your morning menu. The images on the alphabet flash cards and number flash cards were less whimsical and more creepy than I had thought. I also purchased knowing I wouldn’t use the faith components, so I can’t speak to that.

The crafts look great and I love that they are integrated into the program, but I am a little disappointed with the music section. I plan to use the Peter and the Wolf stuff down the road with my son, but use Carnival of the Animals now while he’s young. I was also under the impression that there were more music activities, not just classical music. The other included suggested music is a little tin-eared and only for Bible and catechism memory work. There are much more fun and artful memory work songs out there. I had been hoping for something like movement and music but this doesn’t provide that.

I ended up making my own practical life skill cards (I found the manners and etiquette cards to be less helpful and more like affirmation cards), virtue cards (the character cards moved too slowly and again felt like unnecessary affirmation cards at times), Bible memory cards that I know fun songs to pair with, and faith statement cards.

I was also surprised to see that some activities are much out of season, for example a summer themed book that would be read sometime in November or early December most likely.
Finally, I love the idea of using a bulletin board to keep us on track each week, love the gross motor skill ideas, morning menu and basket ideas too. Overall a good backbone but I will likely choose something different next time around.

This curriculum was perfect for what we were needing! The materials are beautiful, and the quality is definitely worth getting the printed version. We are halfway through and have really enjoyed it. We look forward to doing the activities each day. It has been easy to customize for what level and pace we need. This program has been a very rich, yet gentle and exactly what I wanted for the younger years! It really has been such a joy to do with my little guy, and we can't wait to move on to Primer in a few months!

It took me a while to get my bearings and find a rhythm that worked for my family. I tried to start up with an older 3 Y.O. and 1 Y.O. and had to put it away for a few months because of life-changing diagnoses and out-of-state moves. By the time I pulled it out again, I had a 2 and 4 year old and it was developmentally better time frame to start up Preschool. We consistently did 2-4 days/week, repeating one or two units per month in order to spend more time on certain things. I didn’t utilize the full bundle (arts/crafts/storyboard in particular were left out generally but sporadically utilized) because doing the whole bundle was beyond our family’s capacity. The consistency and content was great for my littles and it opened up pathways for good conversations (many teaching opportunities of “how does God expect me to live in this moment?”) thank you for assembling a beautiful curriculum that helped orient me and my littles to God and learning about this world He’s given us. 💛

A few things I struggled with:
1- getting to the library to get the recommended readings. I didn’t have most of the books and couldn’t make it to the library often enough. I tried to utilize what we had at home but it was hard to weave in topics with the literature I had at home.
2- I am partly colorblind. While I love the aesthetic of the softer watercolors, I had a hard time instructing my toddler correctly on the Morning Binder pages for colors. Maybe an answer key in the teachers guide could help with this.
3- The colors flash cards. My very literal preschooler would often get confused on which color was associated with which flash card. For example, she would often say Green for the Pink flash card because the Green stood out more vibrantly than the Pink. We addressed this by asking “what color is ____?” to direct her focus, but maybe something to consider. We eventually put the flash cards away when she got her colors done well enough.