All Saint’s Play’s Little Lessons is an open-and-go, joyful and sweet Catholic preschool curriculum.
Today I am reviewing for you All Saint’s Play’s Little Lessons Catholic Preschool Curriculum. I am so excited to be partnering with All Saints Play. Amanda and her team do a beautiful job with their products and I’m actually so excited about them. They aim to provide beautiful, simple and fun resources for Catholic families.
This post may contain affiliate links. See my full disclosure here.
The Basics
Little Lessons is a digital (print at home) curriculum for young Catholics ages 2-5. There are 4 units with 8 weeks of lessons in each unit. Each week is divided into 3 lessons. 96 lessons total in all 4 units. You can print each week individually or a whole unit together. I used it this spring with my 3 and 5 year old. Some things were much too easy for my advanced kindergartener, but he enjoyed it a lot. My 3 year old was at just the right level academically.
My Quick Thoughts:
- open and go, actually
- quick and easy to do
- beautiful, colourful and simple
- well-rounded and thorough
- not flakey, has enough “meat”
- deeply rooted in our Faith
- no wishy-washy
- very age-appropriate for preschool
- nicely organized
- lots of visual aids
- cohesive
- affordable
- variety of engaging topics and themes
- not just the saints your kids already know
- great for boys as well as girls
The Visuals
Little Lessons Catholic Preschool is visually appealing, well laid out, and colourful. It is beautiful in simple and fun way that appeals to small children and adults, too. The saints are adorable. The lessons are clear and nicely organized. The colour scheme is fun and modern.
A Complete and Well-Rounded Catholic Curriculum
Little Lessons is a complete curriculum. That means, if you only use this resource all year, your child will receive a well-rounded Catholic education. If you did nothing else with your preschooler but Little Lessons, they would be learning prayers and catechism questions, being read to from picture books and the Bible, singing songs, doing crafts, activities, motor skills, going on field trips, recognizing letters and numbers, and much more.
Catholic elements:
- Learn four traditional prayers
- Learn simplified memory work from the Baltimore catechism
- Each week, meet two new saints (1 male and 1 female) and learn about them
- Complete hand-drawn colouring pages for each saint
- Admire classical Catholic artwork
- Some of the weeks have hymns and some have other children’s songs
- Read from My Catholic Children’s Bible each week
- Learn about other elements of our Faith in a gentle way such as angels, the Vatican, popes, and more!
Authentically Catholic Preschool Curriculum
The first thing I noticed about Little Lessons is that everything is authentically Catholic. You can tell this curriculum was produced by someone who loves the faith and has a gift for imparting it to children.
Open and go, simple to Use
The level of open-and-go that this curriculum is, makes it so that its actually easier to do school with your preschooler than not. I was using this to give a little one-on-one time with my needy extroverted 3-year old during homeschool mornings. It gave us just enough fun, engaging learning for his cup to be filled up and to play happily while I did school with the others.
Cohesive Units
Once you get the hang of the program, you and your child know just what to do, because the same tasks are repeated throughout, advancing in challenge incrementally. Everything flows nicely and you can tell a lot of thought was put into planning each unit.
As a person who tends to be creative and have no trouble coming up with learning activities on my own, I saw a huge benefit in how these activities continued to work on the same skills over and over in a more systematic way than I would typically implement.
Low Cost Homeschool Curriculum
Little Lessons is very affordable, making a quality Catholic education accessible to families who might be on a limited budget and already spending on schoolbooks for older kids. And then there’s the fact that it is digital. Being able to print it again and again in a Catholic family … well that’s priceless!
Compare this price to the popular Catholic Homeschool curriculum Seton. Seton Pre-K is priced at $225 USD before shipping. Seton is all physical resources, many consumable which need to be replaced for each child. For me, digital is a no-brainer.
Homeschool tip: I like to make little spiral workbooks with digital resources by binding them with my GBC Pro-Click, one of my best homeschool purchases!
A Supplemental Resource for Older Kids
All of my kids enjoyed the saint colouring pages in Little Lessons, and some of these things are nice to review with bigger kids, too. We wound up including everyone in the prayer, Catechism and reading parts of this curriculum.
Overall
Honestly, if you’d have told me I’d be singing the praises of a preschool curriculum, I would have laughed.
Do preschoolers really need a curriculum? Well, no. You can read to them, sing songs, and make the alphabet out of playdough all by yourself without a curriculum. But I am totally sold on Little Lessons, and here’s why:
- a financial commitment sometimes is just the little bit of accountability you need to actually do the thing
- you’re busy, I’m busy: making it as easy and accessible as can be can be the difference between it happening and not happening
- This was actually easier to do than not do, and that is saying something
- my kids asked to do it so they loved it
- great visuals you can put on the wall to aid learning and make memory work a normal part of life: we have been quizzing the kids on the names of the 12 apostles lately at supper
- tiny bite-sized pieces of huge things like our catechism and the lives of the saints
- an investment in your child – and the quality time spent together doing these little, joyful lessons may just be the best part
Little Lessons has been such an asset to our homeschool these past few months. Some mornings, it has made the difference between a grumpy, attention-seeking threenager and a happy, cup-filled-up preschooler! I love that its beautiful , totally open and go, and everything points back to our faith. It also is a well-rounded curriculum for preschool, balancing catechism, reading picture books, motor skills, alphabet and numbers, days of the week and all sorts of lovely things you’d like your little ones learning but sometimes forget to do (it’s honestly great review for some of my bigger kids as well!).
Tips for Using Little Lessons
Because I love Little Lessons so much I am also going to give you some TIPS to get you started!
- Purchase the whole thing (all 4 units at once) to save money and print them all right away so you have them ready to go.
- Look at the picture books and put them on hold or purchase them in advance. I have reached out to Amanda to see if she has a complete book list for each Unit. UPDATE: The complete booklist can be found here.
- Put tabs on the Lesson Overview pages that occur every 3 lessons so you can easily reference the handy “supplies needed” section at the bottom.
- Every 3 lessons is its own little section focusing on one letter of the alphabet and two saints, its own colour, song to learn and thematic elements . Example: Lessons 1-3: the letter A, St Agnes and St Augustine, garden theme, Raffi garden song.
- Put together a little supplies bin with scissors, markers, pencils, play dough, glue and other items listed.
- Join the private online community where the All Saints Play team provide extra resources and answer your questions.
Get Little Lessons here.
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