Homeschooling preschool. Is that even a thing? I didn’t know. Preschool is optional, right. So does it count if I homeschool preschool? I guess it all depends on who’s counting.
I was talking to a friend of mine earlier today about starting my baby off in kindergarten. She doesn’t know a whole lot about homeschooling but she’s sincere and well-meaning. She asked me, “you’ve been doing some preschool stuff, right?”. Um, yes. Would they count it as “doing some preschool stuff” if they were talking to their preschool teacher who sees their kids with a group of about 20 others for 3 hours a day twice a week? But for me who pours into my children all day long 7 days a week, it’s just “doing some preschool stuff?” Well-meaning though it is, I understand why it makes homeschool moms defensive to hear this sort of thing even from a good friend. So yes, I’ve been “doing some preschool stuff” and I’m going to tell you all about it.
First, let me say, no matter the pressure you have intentional or not or none, I don’t think it is necessary to buy into a package of curriculum or any co-ops or enrichment programs for preschool. I have never had any of my children in a preschool program outside of the house. I’m not going to say this pertains to kids with extreme learning disabilities or other special circumstances. But for my kids, ordinary as they are though I certainly feel like they are extraordinary, it has not been necessary and they are thriving.
I did what any parent would do. From birth, you celebrate every milestone from their first laugh, to rolling over, sitting up and then walking. You read to them, help them explore, and talk to them constantly to develop their language skills. Even before my kids could talk, we learned letters and numbers by cutting them out with play-doh (something I heard is a great tool for dyslexic children too). But we used a lot of other tools too. So many, there is no way I will be able to name them all here. And it has changed over the years as I’ve had more children and our daily routine and needs have changed. I’ll try to tell you categorically what I do for preschool ages 3-5 and roughly how often. I’ll include links below so you can go check out the materials if you need ideas for your own preschooler. And if you have specific questions about what we used or things I didn’t cover, be sure to post them in the comments below.
Crafts, Projects, Motor, and Life Skills
First, even before the age of 3, we always started with a lot of crafts. Every day we were either coloring, painting, playing with play-doh, stamps, helping Mama with sewing projects, you name it. Sometimes we worked other things into craft time, such as letters and numbers with play-doh, and other times we just kept it free and easy. The kids do great with the learn to draw books but we use them sparingly as they all have a pretty intense desire to do it themselves. I love seeing what they create and fostering their imaginations. I keep every piece of artwork on display, and for the 2-dimensional stuff I shift a small stack to the scanner for each child as new artwork replaces it. There are great places like Artkive that will do this for you and even turn their artwork into a book.
One of the first more formal things we do is the Big Preschool workbook. It has a variety of different activities from color and shape identification to letters and numbers, with fun coloring pages, matching games, pattern recognition and mazes. It’s usually our first test of whether our little ones are ready to sit down and learn. While I follow their lead as to whether they are ready for the book, I do insist that they keep going through the book sequentially if they want to do it. And so far, my boys show a clear readiness for it around 3 or 4 years old and really love to work through it and learn. I will let them do as many pages as they want to and I pull it out and encourage them to start the next page most days of the week. Once they complete the book, there is a certificate of completion at the end which is a fun way to commemorate their accomplishment (usually along with a trip to the ice cream shop!).
We also do a science project once a week on what we call “Friday Sci-day”. We have a little science kit we purchased unopened from a used curriculum sale and the Usborne 50 Science Things to Make and Do. Hardly any prep work necessary and we simply pick one we have the items for and have at it! We have made foaming monster volcanos and shadow puppet boxes. And a favorite is my son’s lemon tree that we started from a lemon seed I pulled out of our dinner ingredients. He loves it dearly and likes to check the growth and make sure it is watered.
My kids like to work on more fine motor skills with legos, World Record Paper Airplanes, cutting and taping projects. They have also benefitted greatly from participating in home projects learning how to pry nails out of 2x4s, paint the walls of our home, weed and plant shrubs and flowers. Endless life skills just by living life with them and involving them in things even if sometimes this Mama’s heart rate is a bit elevated and I’m handing out eye and ear protection. But I don’t ignore the more formal teaching of reading, writing and arithmetic either.
Language Arts
For reading, I have been reading aloud to my children for at least an hour a day since each was around the age of two, sometimes many hours a day. I taught my oldest his letters on the fly just with play-doh and some markers and paper. I would cut out the letters or write them in different colors and talk to him about them so he could see and hear them and watch as I wrote them.
When my first son had learned his alphabet and had started memorizing his “Look Say” books, I knew it was time to teach him to read. We love Siegfried Englemann’s Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. It is so great for homeschool families. I could simply sit next to him with the book and read my lines and wait for his response. If he responded incorrectly, the book went through exactly what to do. I didn’t have to prepare the lessons ahead of time and each one took only about 20 minutes. We got through more than half of the book in a semester and by then my son had already taken off reading everything he could on his own. It just clicked. He was reading level 2/K readers for 2nd graders before he even began kindergarten with words like “carnivorous” and “mosquitos” with joy and comprehension!
We also worked on writing but less frequently as my oldest didn’t take to that as quickly. But by the time he was four years old, he was holding a pencil correctly without reminder and knew how to write all of his letters and his name. The 4-in-1 Learn to Letter with Guidelines workbook is great for the year before kindergarten. They start by tracing letters following the numbers and arrows so that they write them the correct way, not just so they look right. The guidelines are actually indentations in the thick pages that keep their pencil on track (or marker as we sometimes used to keep it interesting with different colors). This is also especially great for young learners who may be interested in writing but don’t have the stability of hand to make straight lines well yet. The book has multiple pages for each step and for upper case and lower case letters.
Our reading and writing regimen wouldn’t be complete without Reading Eggs and Leap Frog. As a mom of three boys spaced relatively close together, I realized some well vetted tools would help in our daily routine and provide them another source for learning visually that wasn’t as labor intensive for me. Leap Frog produces a series of short half-hour long videos focused around mathematics and language arts. I use this to teach my preschoolers when I need to put the baby down for his nap each day as it is entertaining and fun for them and guarantees me some time when I know my 3-year old won’t be trying to escape out the front door or jump the fence out back.
Likewise, Reading Eggs is a great app that we subscribe to very inexpensively that first does a placement test for each child and then puts them into a Candy Crush/Bible App for Kids sort of course for reading lessons and activities. It provides interactive digital curriculum, testing, and parent reporting for ages 2 through 13! It has tabs for writing with opportunities to learn about keyboards and even writing contests. And it even has a section for math called MathSeeds. It is pretty self-led and I use it on “guided access” on our kids’ iPad while I cook dinner each night. The kids take turns in their own tabs and like to watch while the others complete their lessons too.
Mathematics
Along with Reading Eggs and Leap Frog, we have used a great little device called a Math Whiz for pre-K math. It is self-led but also audible so I can supervise and help from across the room. It covers arithmetic to division at all different levels and there is no internet connection. Just a couple of batteries. Old school.
I also have started my 5 year-old with the Math-U-See Primer that I purchased at a great discount at a local homeschool group’s used curriculum sale. I may live in one of the wealthiest county’s in the nation, but homeschooling was a purposeful sacrifice for me to give up my salary and focus on what matters. So we don’t want to break the bank with pricey curriculums when we don’t have to. I attended an awesome webinar with Steve Demme, creator of Math-U-See through the Homeschool Summits Curriculum Online Summit 2.0. It was life changing in the way it described place value visually for kids. I am a very mathematically inclined person and even for me my jaw hit the floor as I watched him explain the concepts he teaches through this curriculum. It’s a fun thing we do about once a week the year before kindergarten. Each lesson is just a few minutes long on DVD and there is a teacher book, student workbook and fun manipulatives. We do this during my 2-year old’s nap time so that we don’t have his wild little hands taking off with the manipulatives. So we also make it fun by always having popcorn time with math!
Another favorite for math is the games I make up like Marshmallow Math which we always do up at my family’s cabin in the mountains just handwriting some problems on paper and using regular and mini marshmallows as the manipulatives. The car lot game is another favorite as my 5-year old is a car guy and has a zillion matchbox cars of every type and color. We spend time parking them in different arrangements and categories to learn about addition, subtraction, fractions and even multiplication.
Character and Faith (and some History too)
Last but certainly not least, we place a high emphasis on character and faith. We inherited a fabulous set of books called ValueTales from Shug’s mother. They each teach about a character attribute such as forgiveness, kindness, and gratitude using a true story of a historical figure such as Thomas Edison, Helen Keller, or Benjamin Franklin. They each take a little over a half an hour to read and we have about 30 of them. We usually read one each week which covers character, history and reading all in one!
We also subscribe to Minno through our AppleTV for our kids. It is created by the makers of Veggie Tales and is available through an app and a website that is available on most smart TVs and devices now. Minno has great videos as short as a minute to some that are around 45 minutes long, including devotionals and songs that cover Bible stories, character lessons, fruits of the spirit, and even simple fictional series like Bible Man, Monster Truck Adventures, Veggie Tales, 1-2-3 Penguins and Paws and Tails that teach a biblical virtue, lesson or scripture. The Bible App for Kids by YouVersion is also great for this sort of thing on the go. We usually do one devotional together a day and also read one section out of one of their kid’s Bible story books each night before praying together and going to bed.
I’ve skipped over so much of what we do, but I wanted to give you the big picture stuff without writing a novel. The kids also of course have a number of games, puzzles, and educational toys that help with their critical thinking and other skills, but that’s a story for another post. I’ll link to some of the resources I’ve mentioned here on my Resources page as well if you are interested in finding any of these items, along with others I mention in the blog. If you have any favorite resources you use for preschool, please share them in the comments below!
