How I Homeschool My Preschooler – Guest Post

Tara is a blogger after my own heart!  Her blog, Feels Like Home, is full of useful information and practical advice with a writing style that is easy {and fun!} to read.  Perfect for the mom who needs good ideas, but doesn’t have a lot of time to sift through froo froo.  You might remember her from a post I did on storing hand-me-downs because she is working through a series of posts on creating a keepsake quilt from baby clothes…something I hope to do someday with Emmy’s things.  Today, she offers her take on homeschooling preschoolers, namely her 3 year old daughter, Grace.

My daughter, Grace, is 3, and she is eager to go to kindergarten.

My husband and I have made the decision to homeschool our children, so she won’t go to kindergarten. Trying to stave off a big meltdown when she comes to this realization, I suggested to her that we could “play kindergarten” at home, now.

I want to pause to tell you that I work full time (as a high school teacher, ironically). My daughter spends her weekdays at a preschool/daycare. I lament it daily. My husband and I are working to change our situation by January when our second baby is due. Our circumstances are what they are for the moment, and I have to make our schooling plan work.

I mention Grace’s preschool/daycare partly to say that she gets lots and lots of time to play. Grace has plenty of social time with her friends, as well as unstructured time to play and run around and do the things that 3-year-olds need to do. She also gets some time at preschool to learn to cut with scissors, color, paint, and write her name.

Grace’s Interests

When I first broached the idea of playing kindergarten with Grace, she was ecstatic. I talked with her about what she wanted to do, and I learned the following:

• She wants to learn to read. Like, yesterday.
• She is not concerned about writing, and she does not want to work on it.
• She likes numbers, but she doesn’t want to learn “math” in terms of a school subject.
• She is very interested in animals and general science concepts, though she doesn’t want to do those in terms of a school subject, either.

Curricula I Purchased

Given her interests and some wonderful advice from my friend Tiffany, I purchased the following:

• Hooked on Phonics Pre-K through Grade 2
• Handwriting Without Tears Pre-K Starter Set
• Leap Frog’s DVDs – Letter Factory, Word Factory, and Adventure to the Moon
• Kumon workbooks – My First Book of Cutting, My First Book of Tracing, and My First Book of Coloring
• Before Five in a Row
• Expedition Earth and Discovering God’s Animals

How Our Homeschooling Works

Because I like John Holt’s unschooling model for small children, and I really wanted to foster the playing kindergarten idea, I didn’t set aside a block of time each day for “school.” Especially since Grace and I are apart for most of the day, I didn’t want school to be a chore at the end of the day. I was concerned that having a set “school” time each day after work and daycare would make school a duty that Grace and I would come to dread.

Instead, I set up a playing kindergarten basket next to our couch in the living room. In it, I put the first Hooked on Phonics workbook, the Stamp and See Screen & letter stamps from Handwriting Without Tears, the Kumon coloring book, and a book that I selected from Before Five in a Row. I also put the DVDs with all of Grace’s other DVDs, so that she could choose them when she has some tv time.

After I set up the Playing Kindergarten basket, I told Grace about it. I talked it up, not in terms of school and lessons, but in terms of “Here’s how we can play with these cool things.” She was super excited about the basket, and she has chosen something to work on most days since I set up this system. (I’d estimate that we do a lesson of some sort, at Grace’s request, 5 days a week, though they aren’t always the weekdays.)

Our Early Results

Grace adores the Leap Frog DVDs and asks to watch them at least three days a week. After watching the Letter Factory DVD three or four times, she knew all of the letters and all of their sounds. I thought that was an amazing result.

Because Grace learned so much from the Letter Factory DVD, Grace really doesn’t need the Pre-K level of Hooked on Phonics. We’ve done three or four lessons from it, but she’s become completely bored by the workbook. I’m going to pull the Pre-K workbook out of our basket and put the Kindergarten version in. I think it will be a lot more appropriate for where she’s at.

Grace really likes the Handwriting Without Tears manipulatives. She likes to play with the Stamp & See letters and the dough that came in our box, but we rarely use them to make letters. Usually, they are part of our unstructured play on the large Magna Doodle.

We are already most of the way through the Kumon coloring book. Grace loves it, and she will do ten or more pages at one sitting.

Grace is not into Before Five in a Row. Not at all. She loves to read and be read to, but she does not want to talk about the books in a learning sense. I’ve been trying some different tactics to make this work, but she has seen through me so far.

The Expedition Earth curriculum is a wee bit above Grace. I knew that was a possibility as it’s a K-3 curriculum, but we work on it bits and pieces at a time.

A Last Word

One thing that I didn’t mention previously is my iPhone. Grace has a few iPhone apps that she is allowed to play with: Super Why, First Words: Animals, Monkey Preschool Lunchbox, Giraffe’s Preschool Playground, Tozzle, and Jirbo Match. Each one teaches letter skills, word skills, or thinking skills, and Grace thinks they’re really cool and fun.

I wouldn’t change our method of homeschool for anything at this point. It’s very low pressure, and Grace is learning in leaps and bounds. She is really far ahead of her 3-year-old peers (though that wasn’t my intention), and each new skill is leading to new interests.

For Grace, school is fun, and school is interesting, and that was my dream result.

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Tara is a wife and mom who has been publishing Feels Like Home since 2007. She writes a variety of posts: food and cooking tips, craft ideas, and a myriad of parenting (mis)adventures help make readers lives easier or at least make them laugh along the way.

You can learn more about Tara at Feels Like Home.

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