The Preschool Homeschool

Happy new year everyone! What are your goals for your homeschool this year? This year is a big year for us. We’ll be finishing up our 3-yr. old pre-k program and start learning more advanced stuff after summer. She turned 4 in December, so by this fall she should be ready for some serious Pre-K fun!! Our goals for the first half of 2009 are:

• Learn all letters and letter sounds by May
• Know how to write her first name
• Know how to spell her first name
• Know her phone number and address
• Know how to count and recognize numbers up to 50
• Know basic addition using counting and sorting activities
• Know how to mix and create new colors from primary colors

That’s about it for the rest of this school year. Our goals for the latter half of 2009 are dependent upon how far we get in the earlier part. We haven’t done much since Thanksgiving, but we’re getting ready to get back into the swing of things. The last relative leaves tomorrow and then life gets back to normal.

With the holidays upon us, saving money in every way seems more important than other times of the year. I found some very productive curriculum materials this weekend for $3. I got an entire alphabet strip set that has colorful letter and flowers all over it that I hung around the dining room. Alphabet Strips I also got two packages of large die cut shapes. One is coins and the other is weather. I found all of these items at a store called the Dollar Tree. A run of the mill dollar store. They had obviously gotten some overstock from an educational supply company because they had tons more items useful for homeschooling, but not necessarily for preschool homeschooling. So don’t pass up your local dollar stores when looking for preschool supplies.

Homeschooling during the holidays is one of my favorite times. There are so many free activities available online and in our community that I don’t have to do too much but wake up and see what the world gives us to learn. This month we are focused on learning a few christmas songs - Rudolph, Jingle Bells and Santa Claus is Coming to Town. We’ll also be baking a lot and learning about measuring and cooking. December is my favorite month to teach about cooking, ingredients, measuring etc…I also use December to teach my kids about giving. We do either Operation Shoebox or choose an angel from the tree and buy presents for a child. This year my son is working on doing a care package for the soldiers, and he’s really enjoying that. Next year I’ll focus more on other holidays celebrated this time of year, but she’s still too young to grasp the concept of other religions/holidays this time of year.

Don’t forget about the cookie contest going on over at my other blog. There’s only one entrant right now, so let’s get some competition going. This is the last week to submit a recipe for a $10 Walmart gift card. Click Here To Enter

If you’d like a chance to win a $10 Walmart gift card, visit my Cooking Kids Blog and enter your favorite kid-friendly christmas cookie recipe. On a side note, if you have a blog, letting your kids help you run a contest is a great learning experience. The kids and I ran a no-bake cookie contest earlier this year and the kids really enjoyed helping and learning about no-bake cookies and the judging process. In the beginning they were both willing to pick the first cookie they liked as the winner, but after seeing how the judging process worked, they were excited for each new recipe.

If you’re not big on cooking, you can run a story contest, poem contest, joke contest or any other topic you and your family would like judging. If you have a homeschooling blog, you could run a most creative homeschooling project contest or something along those lines. Good luck!

One great thing about homeschooling is that you don’t have to worry about doctor’s notes and school excuses for absences when your child gets sick. However, if you’re anything like me, you do worry about an illness totally putting you behind in your homeschooling plan. While we are generally laid-back homeschoolers, I do worry when illness makes everything come to a complete stop.

I can honestly say that we haven’t done a darn thing for the past two weeks. It all started with complaints of sore throats, which turned into coughs and sleepless nights. Once that was over, my daughter, who is the preschooler, got pink eye. So we spent one day at the Dr.’s and pharmacy and the next two days applying eye ointment that makes it really difficult to concentrate when your eye feels goopy and gross.

That was finally cured this last weekend and I thought we could get back on track. But what happens Tuesday morning? The return of the Pink Eye Princess and this time it went after Mama! So now both of us have pink eye, and we’re derailed before we can technically even get back on the track. But then I remember that there’s no rush and to just enjoy this time of hanging out and complaining to each other that we can’t see out of one eye very well. So when illness derails your homeschooling, just enjoy the good times.

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.

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.

I’m always interested in how other people manage their homeschooling days, so I thought I’d share ours. We don’t have a set schedule, but we do have a typical day.

7:30-8:30 - Wake up and get the kids breakfast and get Gavin to school before 8:30.

8:30-10:00 - I eat breakfast and handle some of my freelancing work while Avlyn watches two of her favorite shows - The Imagination Movers and Charlie and Lola.

10:00-12:00 - I print out any activities for the day, we get washed up and dressed, and then we work on our projects. Sometimes we do alphabet crafts, cooking projects, go for a walk and observe nature, practice writing, and study our weekly Bible verse.

12:00 - 12:30 - We have some lunch and wait for daddy to come home for his lunch.

12:30-2:00 - Depending on the day, we sometimes have gymnastics. This is basically the time we do any errands or clean up for the day.

2:00-4:00 - Avlyn might nap for an hour or so in the late afternoon, but we leave by 3:30 to pick up her brother at school. We get home by 4:00.

4:00 - on… - Start dinner, help with homework, play outside, get ready for bed.

9:00-11:00 - I work on any freelance projects I didn’t get finished in the morning.

Our schedule varies when we have playgroup days and field trips. We belong to a mommy -n- me group that plans lots of social activities. For example, this Thursday we will leave right after dropping her brother off at school for a field trip to a pumpkin farm in Arkansas. That will take up our whole day, but she’ll learn plenty. I also host a cooking club once a month for her and her friends called Little Chefs. That takes up most of our later morning and early afternoon one Friday a month. So our schedule is dependent upon what fun, educational activities we have planned, but for the most part our day is like the one outlined above.