Preschool

-You've decided to homeschool your school-aged child, and you don't want your little one to feel left out.
-You've decided to homeschool, but your oldest child is still a toddler and you're excited to begin. 
-You've decided to see how it goes homeschooling your toddler before you make the decision to keep going past Kindergarten. 
-You have a toddler who is advanced or enjoys "playing school" and asks for lessons. 

Do any of these sound like your situation? 

Homeschooling is amazing and beneficial for most children, however lets back up a little and look at the idea of "pre" schooling...

Once a long time ago, kids went to school for the first time at about 6 years old. There was no such thing as preschool. Pre-school-learning was what the parents taught them before the age of compulsory attendance. Kids were arriving at school for the first time with varying skill and knowledge levels. Some could read and write, some didn't know the alphabet. Seeing that those with two parents, one of whom stayed home to care for and teach the children, had a head start over those in families where both parents worked or where the only parent they had worked, and where children being raised by natural born citizens had an advantage over immigrant children, the idea was conceived to begin school with Kindergarten. Kindergarten was to be a pre-school class that was optional for those who for whatever reason could not sufficiently prepare their children for school. An equalizer so that the children would begin grade 1 at closer to the same level. It would be so much more efficient to shuffle the kids through the grade exactly matched to their ages and all of them learning the same thing at the same time like nice little cookie cutter robots. 

Well, kids are kids. They are so vastly different from one another that what one child learns most easily at 3, another may learn most easily at 9, and so Kindergarten didn't magically fix the problem of children entering school with varying abilities. 

In the 1950's a book came out called "Why Johnny Can't Read" which shed unwelcome light on the way children were shuffled through like little memorizing robots, being taught to read by sight-memory and not by phonics. Well phonics, as you will soon discover (if you have not already), takes one-on-one time and attention to teach. The child needs to be shown, listened to, and gently corrected until it sticks. It's not a method that works well in a large classroom setting, but it's the method that works best for children's futures. If they're taught to memorize whole words then once teacher isn't there to tell them what a word is, they can't figure it out and their vocabulary has maxed out. Teach them phonics and they can learn new words anywhere they find them until they are 115 years old. But again, it's not a method that works well in a classroom. The larger the class size, the more you need to have all the kids do the same thing at the same time so they don't confuse each other, and you can't check each one every minute to make sure they are all getting it. Best they can do is start them early in hopes that any child who is behind will be able to keep up anyway somehow, and figure out whatever they missed in time. 

Schools back in the 70's and 80's in the area of the US where my family lived were giving parents lists of requirements of what they had to have taught their child by the time they entered Kindergarten or 1st grade so that they would be on the same level as their peers. This didn't work to make the children into exact educational replicas of one another either! Shocking, right? The parents were blamed. They were too lazy, too busy, too stupid, too uneducated, or didn't care. Obviously. Or else all the kids could and would know the same things by the same age. /sarc So the parents were blamed and pre-schools were invented so that children could go to learn the 'right things' to be able to enter Kindergarten on the same level as their peers. 

Do you see what happened there? Slowly through the ages, parents went from Ma Ingalls capably teaching Laura, Mary, and Carrie just fine in the wagon or the cabin in between living near schools; to parents can't be trusted to teach their own children properly after age 6; to parents can't even teach them to be ready for school so we need Kindergarten to teach them to be ready for grade school; to parents can't even get them ready for Kindergarten properly because they're still not all coming out at the same level so we need to have preschool to teach them to be ready for Kindergarten. 

The goal has been to have the kids pop on through their age-assigned grade levels at exactly the same rate as their peers - and it keeps not working because they are human beings and the primary-age development of math and language and logic skills varies WIDELY from human child to human child. So the parents were blamed as being unable or unwilling to teach their children to be school-ready - and sometimes, because the schools had failed those very parents in their own childhoods, they truly were unable. How can Johnny teach his kid to read if he's functionally illiterate? How can Johnny have the CONFIDENCE to teach his child even what he DOES know if he's been told he's a stupid failure and can't possibly teach his own kid? 

Meanwhile, as the parents were being blamed and convinced that they were all too dumb to educate their own kids, that education must be done by trained government employed licensed teachers only, the public schools continued to fail the children. And they failed them because they did and do continue to operate on the assumption that at least "most" kids can and should be forced to learn assembly-line style as if they were a car being assembled rather than a human being. Kids who couldn't conform were labeled with "learning disabilities" and that was another excuse on the list of why some kids weren't coming out of each grade "matching" the others, academically. Blame them getting started "too late," blame the parents, blame the kids, blame the disabilities. 

As if it weren't already painfully obvious that the government school system wants to educate identical robots, next they tried to blackmail the individual schools by saying that if some of the children didn't test as well as their peers, the school would lose funding. No child left behind sounds so nice, until you realize it's just another attempt to smash the ill-fitting children into the same molds again. If they lose funds they can't pay the teachers, so they require the teachers to teach the kids how to pass the tests. If they pass the tests, the school won't be penalized and can still pay the teachers. And can the kids actually understand and apply what they are learning? There's no time for that! There's only enough time to teach to the test. Teach to the test. Teach to the test. Pass the test is all that matters. And in order to make sure the kids cooperate like good little memorizing robots, we should start them earlier. And so making preschool and Kindergarten mandatory (or K at the very least) has been seriously debated among many. (Note: I have nothing against school teachers. I believe they are being failed by the system too. Maybe I'll write more on that someday.) 

What can we take away from all this? Firstly that you're probably going to meet with some friction when you decide to homeschool your kids. We've been conditioned for generations to believe that parents are incapable and only trained professionals can educate children. We've been told that the earlier the government teachers get them the better! This is in part because it takes an 8 hour schoolday to teach a child what they can learn at home in an hour or two. So if you're at home with your kid and they are done 4 subjects by 10am? Your friends and family are going to think you're not educating them properly. They can't see right off the bat that your kiddo isn't standing in line for untold minutes, raising their hand to go to the bathroom, waiting 20 minutes for the teacher to get around to them, drilling and testing and doing busywork, so they can be more than sufficiently educated in a shorter amount of time. 

And like it takes less hours in the day to educate a child at home than it does in a school classroom with 20+ other students, it also means it's completely unnecessary to start them sitting at a book with a pencil at <5 years old. When they are ready, they will learn it quickly and easily. If they're not ready, you can start them at 6 months old and it still won't make them be ready, it will only stunt their development. 

Preschool is 100% unnecessary. 

It's true. Preschool, like Kindergarten, was invented to help the school system get their little robot clones ready for synchronized learning. And like Kindergarten, it doesn't work to magically make all kids learn the same way at the same time. 

Preschool is 100% unnecessary... BUT parental nurturing, praise, teaching, and guidance to little ones is like sun to a flower. 

So am I saying not to teach your babies and toddlers? NO. I'm not saying that at all. But I'm saying that the time for book-learning isn't when they are little. That's the time for play-learning. They were created to learn through play. To learn about gravity by dropping their cup off the highchair, to learn object permanence by peek-a-boo, to learn about zoology by playing with puppies, botany by picking dandelions. 

Newer homeschoolers have coined the word "unschooling." While the meaning is a bit different depending on whom you ask, basically it means learning that is based on interest and activity rather than textbooks and worksheets. Unschooling is perfect for your preschooler. Toddlers have been learning through unschooling long before that word existed. 

And sometimes, because human children are not little robot clones, you'll get a child who is asking you to teach them to read at the tender age of 2. (Ask me how I know.) 

And someone is going to be horrified and tell you that you'll scar them for life physically and educationally if you place a pencil in their hand before 7 years old at the least and you must go read "Better Late Than Early" rightthisinstantorelse. 
And you will hear from the other side that a child like that is too gifted to be taught at home and you should look into getting them into a gifted preschool ASAP because if you wait they will lose their chance to get into MENSA and it will be all your fault. 
And you're just going to have to tell yourself (and your critics) this: 

"I am this child's parent. I know my child best. I will teach my child better than anyone else because I love my child better than anyone else. I will base my child's education plan on their cues and abilities. If that means delaying seated instruction until they are compulsory age, or if that means teaching a 2 year old to read, then that's what I will do! Because I will do what's best for my child as an individual and not a clone, as a human and not a robot." 

You've got this! ♥

Suggested post:  Preschool Curriculum Ideas