Teaching Preschoolers

If you haven't read my post on why preschool is a thing in the first place, you might be interested in checking that out before reading further. Sometimes people think they *need* to do preschool with their little ones in the same way we *need* to teach an older child division, or their child will be "behind." When you have a classroom with a lot of students, you need to make sure they are all as close as possible to the same in terms of development and education because it's hard to move forward to the next lesson if many are still struggling with the previous lesson. That's what Pre and K are for. They are to try to get the stragglers up to speed so they don't hold the class back. 

However at home, ideally the mother will nurture her child naturally rather than trying to speed them up or slow them down to match other children. Ideally at home a child can be educated as a whole human being, different from other human beings and with a unique approach to the world. Rather than beginning their education from a place of trying to calibrate them to match, we should begin by meeting the child where they are at and helping them to grow and thrive based on themselves and not on other people. 

If you're new to homeschooling, there are a couple things you need to 'throw away' from your thought process right away. Think of these things as social conditioning or brainwashing and you're about to throw them off like unlocked shackles so you can walk the homeschooling path freely. 

1. Your child is not behind. Behind what? Behind whom? They are not in a race, this is not a large school with a class that needs everyone to be at the same level. Your child should each year be ahead of where he himself was last year, and that's the only thing that counts. Thus if your child is ready to read at 2, teach him. If he's not ready to read until he's 9, teach him what he is ready for and wait him to be ready for the rest. I know this is somewhat more challenging in states where yearly testing is required. Which is why I strongly encourage you to advocate for and vote for the freedom to homeschool without interference from the creators of government schools, because that freedom is the key to those shackles. Stepping out of the classroom means nothing if you're still required to follow the classroom rules. Do your best with the laws you've got, and vote for freedom every chance you get. 

2. This isn't public school. Leave the public school environment at the public school. Do not duplicate it in your home. By doing so you are replacing something organic and wholesome with something that has a lot of issues. If it didn't have issues you don't want (even if those issues in your mind are only the ones related to the virus this year) then your child would be there instead of home. And this includes "preschool" as a means of calibrating your child to match other children. Your child is not other children. Make your home/school/space customized to your child and not to mimic a classroom environment. 

Now assuming you've freed yourself from those two shackles, let's talk preschool! :) 

You taught baby to use a spoon, use the toilet, chew with her lips closed, say please and thank you, walk, run, ride a bike... Preschool and beyond are a lot like that. It's not something that requires a curriculum or a lot of time lesson planning. It doesn't take workbooks and a tiny school desk and chair and a whiteboard or chalkboard. 

It can, but it doesn't have to. Usually you just teach preschool the same way you taught everything else so far. 

The same way you heard baby say, mumumumum and repeated back to her a bunch of times, "That's right, say Mama! Say Mama! Mama loves you! Mama!" 

The same way you tried 43 books, dvd's, and programs to teach toilet use, and finally wound up saying, "Look Sweetie, the diapers are going bye-bye today. I've tried everything else and this is my last ditch effort. Work with me here."

The same way when your tot saw a kite and hollered in excitement you bought a kite and showed him how to run and fly it, helped him get it high in the sky and hold tight to the string so it doesn't escape. 

So preschool is the same: Look at the road construction sign. It says S-L-O-W! It says B-U-M-P! What color is the vest she's wearing? Orange! What color are the flowers on the tree? Pink! Show me your toes! Awesome, now let's put your sock on. Do you see the pretty bee? We can't pet a bee but we can see how pretty they are! What is the bee drinking? What is the yellow dust on the flower? It's pollen! Look here, it's a caterpillar. Did you know a caterpillar is a baby butterfly? 

Teaching moments. Every day is a series of teaching moments and sometimes you'll miss them and think later about what you "should have" said, and sometimes you'll recognize it in the moment and you'll tell them something about whatever they are showing interest in and it will stick. It will stick a million times better than if they saw it in a book, I can tell you from experience. When I was a tot, a child, a teen, my dad would always grab the teaching moments. He'd explain things, stop working to answer my questions, and to this day I remember those lessons far more clearly than the ones I learned from books. 

One time when I was about 2, small enough to crouch under a dining chair, it was after supper and Mom was washing dishes. The door was open to the screen storm door because it was so hot inside, but there was a lightning storm and I was scared. Dad got home late to find me under the chair crying. Mom was tired and asked him to explain lightning to me. He looked at her like she was crazy and said a baby can't understand lightning, but he tried anyway. He took me with him to the door and told me that it was static in the sky, zooming so fast that it made a loud sound, and he told me more and more and I still recall every word. Nitrates. Electricity. Heat expansion. Sound barrier. I drank it in, one eye nervously on the sky. We counted the miles - one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand... 

From then on, he explained everything to me as though I could understand it, even if he wasn't sure if I really could. He grabbed ahold of those teaching moments and every one of them left a mark on who I am today. Lessons, education, but ones that I enjoyed and remembered and recall with fondness. 

Little ones can understand a lot more than we think. The biggest part of homeschooling a preschooler is to keep them nearby and tell them about things. Talk to them and answer their 479 questions a minute as well as you can. Involve them in what you're doing. They LOVE to help with whatever you are doing. Are you doing laundry? They feel so big and helpful if you hand them the wet clothes and they put them in the dryer and close the door. Let them put away the flatware and praise them like crazy. Have them stir while you add ingredients when baking. Chores in older kids build character, chores for a little tot though, if they can do them alongside you, are a source of self-satisfaction and a form of play for them. If they're willing to help, it's a teaching moment. 

Count everything and point out every letter. If they can say a number or letter before you, praise them like crazy! If they want to practice writing, let them try to trace or copy their name. If you write it with a highlighter it makes a good tracing line. But keep in mind that littles don't have much hand strength. Their hand bones haven't fused yet; inside their little hands are to a degree "incomplete," so I don't require too much in the way of writing. It's hard for them to even hold a pencil correctly (tiny hands, long skinny pencil) but also important not to let them get too far into a bad habit of holding it wrong, so make them hold it right but don't have them write for long at a time. 

Non-academic education by approximate age (go by what your kid is ready for): 

1 to 2 years

-Most kids are still putting everything in their mouth so I don't give PlayDoh usually, but I had 2 kids who stopped tasting everything around 18 months so those two I let do it. 

-Baby dolls are great for boys and girls for empathy and social development if proper treatment of babies is demonstrated by adults and the little ones can mimic it with the dolls. 
-Wooden toy cars and trains made with nontoxic paint.
-Giant wooden lacing beads (too big to fit in mouths) - you can use large empty spools from thread with the papers peeled off as well. 

-Bowls and spoons- the noisier the more fun. 
-Scholastic Petting Farm book & DVD - hear and see cute farm animals. 

2 to 3 years 
Same as above, plus 

-There's a company that makes toys from recycled milk jugs. My children love their little tea sets- so thick and sturdy, sized for tiny hands, and can be used for real chamomile tea and cheerios or crackers for a fun snack. Great for developing pouring skills. 
-Melissa & Doug toys. 

-Lauri toys. 
-Save those big sheets of packing paper and empty cardboard boxes to let them scribble on with crayons. 
-Busy books. (They might not be interested in those yet or they might like them sooner.) 
-Toddler-safe pull-back toy cars. 

3 to 4 years 
Same as above, plus 

-Crayola mess-free Color Wonder coloring books. 
-Dress up clothes and costumes. 
-My current 3 year old hasn't put non-food in his mouth for YEARS so I don't stop him from playing with his older brother's LEGOs if big bro doesn't mind. YMMV - know your kid. He's often talking big bro into lending him whatever cool contraption he's made, and then accidentally disassembling it and returning it for fixing many times. 
-Schleich animals!! Many 3 year olds LOOOOVE to have collections of little figurines in their pockets or carried in their chubby little fists all day long. Some of my youngest's favorite things to carry around all day are his little Schleich animals. 
-Small empty plastic containers in which to keep their collections of random little things. 

Academic+ by ability/age (again, go by what your child is ready for.) :

3-4 years or willing to attempt to follow directions, trace a line, or connect two dots 

>Study Time About Three workbooks. From an Amish publisher - the illustrations are so sweet and old-fashioned. Do one page a few times a week, give or take, don't rush. If they don't want to, put it away for a month and then try again. [I didn't know about this with my firstborn and don't remember using it for my secondborn, but I used it for kiddos #3, 4, 5, and #6 is using it now.] 
>IF your child is begging to read and seems ready, you can try Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons. I suggest you do 1 lesson per day and repeat that lesson the next day and the next until it becomes easy before moving to the next lesson. I also suggest that for a child under 5 years old you do not do the writing practice portions unless the child requests it. Your child will probably be reading before they get halfway through the book. [I have never finished the whole book with any of my kids but all of my kids have done at least 20 lessons of it, except my youngest who has so far done 2.] 

>IF you want a whole-curriculum approach you could look into My Father's World. (Only do a whole curriculum if you have a child who keeps asking you all day to make them worksheets and assignments. If you put a curriculum onto a very young child who doesn't want to, you squash their desire to learn and set a precedent of them hating school.) [I have used and still use My Father's World for Kindergarten since my firstborn was 5, but I have not used their preschools since I feel it is more developmentally appropriate to keep the schooling very short and have them play outside most of the day or work alongside me off and on.]

4-5 years or questioning "what does this say?" about letters/words, attempting to count higher than 5 
>Rod & Staff ABCDEF workbooks. From a Mennonite publisher. Use the Bible Story Book and the matching coloring book (B) once or twice a week, and the others go in alphabetical order starting at A and do about 2 pages a day (1 on Bible/coloring-book-day). Sit next to the child to make sure they are holding their pencil correctly and are following the directions. Once the pages are completed, I will walk away to help my older kids and allow the little one to color the pictures on just the completed pages. Some children do not have the restraint to limit themselves to only coloring the images on the pages they have done and will color on whatever they please, in which case I allow them to pick ONE picture to color while I stay with them and then the book is put up- they aren't left unattended with it. 
>Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons. See previous section. Pick up where you left off last year, or begin it if your child is just now ready for it. You could use this with the Rod & Staff ABCDEF workbooks above, or just use one or the other, but I wouldn't use it in combination with either of the following. 
>IF you want a whole curriculum (see my notes on that in previous section), again My Father's World has preschool packages which I have not tried. Here is the one for 4's. 
>A phonics-only option is Easy Peasy. Here is the preschool. It teaches the alphabet through the school year, and then instructs you to go through the summer using the McGuffey Primer to teach sight reading before beginning Kindergarten, then phonics later. I am opposed to teaching sight reading first and believe children will be stronger readers in the long run if they are taught phonics first, so I do not use this one. Please look up research on phonics vs. sight reading and decide for yourself if you will begin this way. 

5-6 years or recognizing some letters, counts at least to 10, shows interest in doing seatwork 

>My Father's World has the sweetest Kindergarten which is what I have used with every one of my kids. Many people complain of it being "too light" but it'a actually developmentally appropriate for a 5 or 6 year old child. The curriculums that people are thinking of when they say MFW K is "too light" are actually not developmentally appropriate - they are too time consuming and intense to be appropriate for a child below 1st grade. MFW K is gentle, but gentle isn't weak. The kids learn well and because it's taught gently they actually retain it better. Because 1st grade is such a step-up as far as how hard it is and how much work it is, some people do 2 years of Kindergarten, which they may call them both Kindergarten or they may call whichever they do first by Pre-5 or Preschool or something else. My Father's World K is gentle enough to do this with if you have an almost-5 year old or young 5 year old and want to do K for 2 years to give them more time to mature (and for their hand strength to develop) before 1st. I've heard of homeschoolers who intend to use Abeka from K on (Abeka being a more rigorous and in my opinion often too much, program) actually use the MFW K as preschool and then go into Abeka. 
>Rod & Staff GHIJKL workbooks. From a Mennonite publisher - since they don't do Kindergarten, this "preschool" is actually what functions as the Kindergarten for the Rod & Staff curriculum. Since it's gentle, in workbook format, and you would have the child do only 2 pages per day, it's also ideal for a "one of two years" Kindergarten, of which you may wish to term the first year another year of Preschool. 
>Another option for K if you chose to do Easy Peasy Preschool phonics and the sight reading over the summer would be to continue with their Kindergarten, which says it teaches phonics in addition to continuing the sight words from before. I tried it over this past summer with my two youngest girls and found it rather bland and disorganized. I wound up picking out the math and not using the "phonics." (Actually I never got to any phonics. Whatever it was I was looking through just seemed like more sight words. When it was the same after a couple weeks, that was the end of my perusal.) We were only doing it for 6 weeks for summer break (to keep them fresh so they didn't forget things) and I admittedly wasn't paying enough attention at the time to have an opinion on whether it would make a good "advanced preschool" or "one of two years of K." 

Whatever you wind up doing or not doing for whatever years of "preschool" you do, keep in mind that once they start 1st grade they can never again just spend their days free without a thought of school and without a paper and pencil calling them back to study. Once they start 1st grade they have 12 grades and then college and then work/marriage/parenthood and they never get that time back to just play and be little. So for now, no matter how ready they are, remember to prioritize keeping it light and fun so they still have plenty of time to play without the worries of a student. If they are advanced and need to do some academics, you know best, don't let anyone talk you into ignoring that need. But also don't let yourself feel burdened that you have to do a full curriculum, all subjects, every day, or for great lengths of time. 10-20 minutes a day for a preschooler is plenty and there's nothing that says if it's a busy week you can't just take off doing any academics with your preschooler. Less is more. Stay flexible, stay open to changes. You'll do fine, and your preschooler too. 

♥

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