The Preschool Homeschool

October 30th is National Candy Corn Day. If you’d like a little bit more information about the candy corn, you can visit Candy USA for fun facts. In the spirit of National Candy Corn Day, why not create your own candy corn out of yellow, white and orange paper. This is a fun simple craft to go along with any information you teach your child about candy corns. Since this learning lesson is about candy, I’m sure you’ll have a very attentive audience.

Candy Corn Craft:
Supplies

1 piece of construction paper, any color you like. She picked red.
1 piece of white paper, orange paper and yellow paper
1 glue stick
Scissors
Crayons or markers to decorate it

Draw a template of a candy corn on the construction paper. A candy corn is basically a triangle with rounded edges on the bottom instead of pointed edges. Separate the candy corn into three sections with a pencil. Using the template as a guide, cut and size a piece of white, yellow and orange paper to fit inside the candy corn template. Once cut to size, let your child glue the pieces on and the decorate it with crayons, markers, glitter etc….

Here’s a pic of Avlyn with her candy corn…..you probably can’t tell, but this is a candy corn inside a pumpkin with snow falling around it. Happy National Candy Corn Day!!

Here’s a very simple but extremely fun activity for preschoolers. This is great for a physical activity or a halloween party. You can use this same idea to make Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, too.

Cut out jack-o-lantern face pieces from felt or paper. If you want, you can buy those premade pumpkin faces made from felt or stickers that they sell this time of year. Blow up a bunch of orange balloons. This game is the most fun when there are bunches of floating pumpkins. Blow up the balloons and let the kids stick the face pieces on to make a balloon jack-o-lantern.

Once the faces dry, give each kid a balloon and let them bounce and hit their floating pumpkins. To play a game, have the kids stand in a circle and hit their balloon towards the person next to them without letting it drop. All the balloons should rotate around the circle and then the kids can have fun finding their pumpkin from the “patch.”

For a 2 person game, stand across from each other and hit the balloon pumpkin back and forth. For more fun, use 3 balloon pumpkins and make sure they don’t hit the ground.

October is a great time to get a jump-start on a seed unit. While spring is the ideal time, letting all those pumpkin seeds go to waste is a shame. We carved up two jack-o-lanterns today and the kids really enjoyed taking all the stuff out of the pumpkin. Well my daughter enjoyed separating the seeds from the pulp, while my son enjoyed digging it all out. Opening a pumpkin is a great opportunity to teach kids how things grow from seeds, and show them how something so large can come from something so small.

We have eight pumpkins this year that we grew ourselves. So the kids took extra pride in carving their jack-o-lantern, knowing they planted and cared for this pumpkin when it was just a blossom. After we cleaned out the pumpkin, the kids and I washed and dried the seeds. Then I toasted them in the oven for about an hour and let the kids try them. They were both interested in trying them, but neither cared for the taste. After adding some sugar and pumpkin pie spice, my daughter liked them.

They learned that not only do seeds grow things, but they’re nutritious and tasty too.  Here are some ideas for a pumpkin seed unit:

Have your child pull seeds out of a pumpkin, wash them, dry them, and toast them in the oven.

Let your child help season them with salt, sugar or spices.

Print out a pumpkin picture. Let your child glue dried pumpkin seeds onto the pumpkin.

Make a chart that shows all the different things a pumpkin seed does. It provides pumpkins, is useful for crafts, can be eaten by people and animals and grows a large plant from just one seed.

Use pumpkin seeds for counting and sorting activities.

Use clay to show the life cycle of a pumpkin seed. Start by sticking a pumpkin seed into green clay to resemble the ground. Then do another green piece with the seed sprouting. Use paper and other craft materials to make a plant come from the seed. Then hollow out an orange clay ball and fill it with pumpkin seeds. Make another orange ball, fill it with seeds, then have your child clean the pumpkin out. Lastly, let them make pumpkin seeds out of white clay and pretend to toast and season them.

Have fun!

Although you might be homeschooling a preschooler who is under no legal obligation to attend any type of schooling, use this time to brush up on your state’s homeschooling laws. If you decide to continue homeschooling into the primary grades, not knowing what your legal obligations are as a homeschooler can actually be dangerous to your homeschooling. The last thing you want is a social worker or truant officer knocking on your door because you failed to notify your school district or send in required test scores.

When we started homeschooling we lived in Florida. I printed out the homeschooling law, read it, knew it and could recite it to anyone who was misinformed. When we moved to Missouri, I did the same thing. Missouri is very lenient though, so there wasn’t much to learn. However, there are about a half dozen states with very stringent requirements - New York and Pennsylvania are two.

Don’t let legal homeschooling requirements dissuade you from homeschooling. Many families meet these hard-nosed requirements with no problem. Other families go above and beyond what they need to do because they don’t understand the laws in their state. Check out HSLDA Homeschool Laws for a rundown of the laws in your state. However, the best way to learn the laws is to contact your department of education and request materials. You can also check out the DOE website for your state, which usually lists the statutes in a PDF file.

I use a variety of websites for printing out activities and getting craft ideas. I also use websites for listening to stories and giving her activities to do. Here is a list of some of our favorite preschool homeschooling websites.

All About Coloring - This website has coloring pages for pretty much all subjects. These are great to use for coloring time or just for fun.

First-School - I use this website for our printable alphabet. I color in the sheets and put them on the wall and then give her a sheet to either color or decorate with seeds, paper, macaroni, etc…

DLTK-Kids - This site has great crafts and ideas for teaching various subjects.

Starfall - This is a well-known site amongst homeschoolers and teachers. I let her get on here and just play until her heart’s content. We do the letters together, and then she play independently.

Santa Clara City Library - This site lets people use the Tumblebooks option. These are e-storybooks, and they actually offer a wide selection. Just look on the left sidebar for the Tumblebooks link.

The Best Kids Book Site - This is my absolute FAVORITE website. I use it almost everyday. It’s so chock full of good stuff, that I haven’t even navigated everything it offers.

Well that’s our list for our most used homeschooling websites. I hope some of them help you homeschool your preschooler.

If you’re part of a homeschooling co-op that doesn’t have a kids cooking club, consider starting one. My daughter loves to cook, so I thought that having a monthly activity where her and her friends can get together and cook would be fun and educational. My cooking club is called “Little Chefs” and we meet one Friday a month.

I plan recipes based on a theme and keep my limit to 10 kids. I’ve never had fewer than 10 show up, so far. The kids LOVE the cooking club. My first theme was apples and this month’s theme was pumpkins and popcorn. Next month we’re doing a theme called Turkey Tracks. All the recipes are age appropriate and most are done independently of the parents. A cooking club teaches kids cooperation as they wait for each kid to stir or add an ingredient. It also teaches that different foods, when combined together, can make a tasty dish. If your co-op doesn’t have a cooking club, get together and plan one. You can read more in-depth blogs about the cooking club and the recipes at my other blog, Cooking Kids/

I love using song and dance throughout the day with my daughter. Preschoolers are famous for loving to jump around singing and dancing. Since the holidays are creeping up on us, I thought I’d share some of our favorite, active Halloween songs.

Fly Little Bats - This song is good for getting kids moving. You can also create a craft project out of this by making the things mentioned in the song. Using felt for a felt board activity is another idea

Tune: Ten Little Indians

Fly, fly, fly little bats

Fly, fly, fly little bats

Fly, fly, fly little bats, Halloween is here.

Repeat with:

2. Crawl, crawl, crawl, little spiders

3. Stomp, stomp, stomp little monsters

4. Creep, creep, creep, little cats

5. Dance, dance, dance, little skeletons

6. Float, float, float little ghosts

If I Were A Little… I use this to help practice listening skills. I don’t do this song with her, but rather sing it and have her listen to the different directions. If she’s paying attention, she can act out the song without my help. Just use a tune you like for this one.

If I were a little ghost, little ghost, little ghost,

If I were a little ghost, this is what I’d do:

I’d float around the town, float around the town, float around the town.

Repeat with:

2. Little witch - zoom to the moon on my broom

3. Little cat - creep on my feet down the street

4. Little bat - fly up high in the sky

5. Little spider - crawl around on the ground

Enjoy!

Here’s a simple, fun craft project for the fall. If you make a bunch of these, you can have your own patch. By stuffing some bags full and some not so full, you get different sized pumpkins. Another fun idea is to get some plastic garden fencing and set it up in a corner of your house. Toss your pumpkins in the corner and add to it a little each day, and watch your pumpking patch ‘grow’.

Supplies:

Brown paper bags

Orange paint

Black crayons or markers

Green pipe cleaners

Leaf cut-outs

Newspaper

Start by stuffing the paper bag with crumpled newspaper and twisting the top closed. Punch a hole into the top of your leaf cut-outs and string them through a green pipe cleaner. Wrap the cleaner around the top of the bag and close it. This is your stem and leaves.

Give your child a sponge or paintbrush and let them paint the pumpkin orange. One idea is to use an old laundry detergent top, glue a piece of kitchen sponge to the opening, and let the kids dab the paint on with this sponge painter. After the paint dries, your child can draw jack-o-lantern faces or leave them plain.

I have to be honest and say that I wince every time I hear a homeschooling family talking about how much money they spent on a preschool curriculum. I know of one family who purchased every single preschool offering put out by Abeka, just because it was there. She spent quite a lot to teach a child who learns best through playing. I am of the mind set that each person does things in their own way, and that includes homeschooling. That doesn’t mean I don’t have an opinion about it.

The public education system has made parents believe that a preschool education ultimately determines which university your child attends. Of course, they want to be the ones to educate your child and increase their public funding. Private daycares will tout their curriculum offerings, hoping you’ll fork over the weekly tuition to ‘educate’ your preschooler. I live in a town where we have a place called The Early Childhood Center. It’s a public preschool for 3 and 4 year olds, and it’s almost expected by the community that a preschooler attend this place. I would need 6 hands and 6 feet to count the number of times I’ve been asked if Avlyn is going to school.

I believe that a preschooler learns best without a curriculum. They don’t need a set number of workbook pages, reading books, and oral quizzes to learn. They do need to play educational games such as alphabet and number bingo, take frequent trips to the library for storytime and to check out books, visit socially with other preschoolers on occasion, take advantage of sports activities geared towards their age group, learn how to use a computer by playing on websites such as Starfall and PBS Kids,practice handwriting skills with fun worksheets and dry erase boards, grow artisitically by painting, coloring, gluing and sculpting with dough, and learning about the world by spending tons of time outside.

This doesn’t mean you don’t plan lessons or buy preschooling products for your child. It just means you don’t expect them to act like elementary school kids when they’re preschoolers. All the so called experts and educators seem to forget that the prefix “PRE” comes before the school, meaning that these kids are in the preschool time of their life. They have plenty of years ahead of them to study for tests, memorize facts and complete drill practice.

Today was our field trip to the pumpkin patch. We visited a placed called Pumpkin Hollow in St. Francis, Arkansas. It’s about 35 miles from where we live in Missouri. This place is so neat. It’s not the typical tourist attraction. It’s very rustic and has a lot of educational value. They do have typical attractions, like a corn maze, hay bales, petting farm and pumpkin sales. But they also have a fish pond where the turtles are so comfortable they come right out of the water to your child to get food.

They also have a gourd tour where you go on a walk and learn about all the gourds they grow. They teach the kids the difference between a pumpkin blossom and gourd blossom. They also show them all sorts of long, short, fat, and skinny gourds. Then they have a little barn area set up where the kids go on a little tour and learn about chickens and eggs, milking cows, pumping water and grinding corn. They actually grind their own corn to feed the chickens.

Last but not least, they let them feed the goats and horses. They also teach them that too much corn can kill a goat and a pony. They give them what looks like flat, little wheat seeds or something to feed the goats. I forgot to ask what it was. Avlyn loves this place. One of my favorite things is their height stick. They have a stick that says, “How tall in the fall” with measurements. Your child can stand next to it each year, and you can see how much they’ve grown. This year we brought a lunch and sat next to the goats and watched (and smelled) them while we ate. She had a blast. Before they leave, everyone gets to pick a pumpkin. Here are some pics from our trip: