When our children are preschool-age, we often hear playing is enough when it comes to their education- and it absolutely is! Sometimes, though, they crave structure and honestly, we do too. What do we do on the days when we are all played out, the weather is less than ideal or we simply need something to do? What do we do to start building a foundation of learning through wonder and play with our children?

This is much of the reason Gentle + Classical Preschool was created. We long to provide a way for moms and children to engage education in a way that is fun, inspires wonder, and cultivates play. (Psst: You can read more about that here, and grab two full FREE units while you’re at it!) Gentle + Classical Preschool is a full-year preschool program. It is a blend of Charlotte Mason and classical studies. The BEST part? The Teacher’s guide is absolutely FREE.

We could talk about SO many of our whys with what we included in the curriculum but today we want to talk about our ABCs. As many preschool curriculums do, each unit has a letter of focus. However, we don’t begin with “A” but instead with “L” - why is that?

We fell in love with the order Handwriting without Tears implements in its curriculum. Starting with one of the easiest letters for small hands to write - the letter L, letters that follow are in groups of similar stroke sequence. This helps prepare little hands to gain easier skills first which leads to developing more difficult skills as they progress through the letters. This simple-to-master letter order can also boost your learner’s confidence! Furthermore, as your little one grows and develops through the school year, this order honors their natural developmental progression by starting with the easiest to master first. Letter formation, however, isn't our only goal when it comes to early literacy. (And in fact, it’s one of the least important aspects focused on in The Gentle + Classical Preschool, which is why we encourage you to download our FREE Teacher’s Guide!) We also want to expose our children to the sight and sounds of letters and honestly, there is no better way to do that than through reading and exposing our children to sounds.

Today we want to include a FREE Letter L book list in this blog post (also, psst: the curriculum has a book list for EACH letter in the Activity + Handicraft Guide!). Grab these books at your local bookshop, Amazon, or your library today.