Random Thoughts for Anyone Considering Home Preschooling
I feel like I have had a lot of people ask me lately about what we’re doing with our homeschool preschool, how we do it, and why we chose to do what we’re doing. Some of the “what” and “how” was in my last post, but this is a bit more of the “why”. Even if this isn’t of interest to a very large number of people, I might save myself a few repetitive emails and post a few more thoughts on the subject here.
Random Thought #1: A lot of wise, experienced homeschooling (and probably even some non-homeschooling) parents will tell you that you don’t really need to do much for preschool. They will tell you that you can just live your life together with your kids, read lots of books, talk about letters and shapes and numbers and colors as things come up, and have fun. Others will tell you just to buy a few preschool workbooks from Target or the dollar store and that will give your kids adequate preparation. I’m sure they are all absolutely right.
Random Thought #2: I’m not sure why other people who believe that #1 is true still do some kind of organized or formal homeschool preschool program…but I feel that it is at least 50% for my own sanity. Two of Madeline’s favorite things are pretend play with me, and doing somewhat organized, structured activities (anything from arts & crafts to board games to science experiments). Playing alone or with Erik is a real struggle for her most of the time, but my tolerance for pretend play (at least in the way Madeline wants to engage in it), is probably a maximum of an hour per day. When we play pretend the way Madeline likes to play pretend these days, she is very much directing the action. While she could probably spend hours directing me how to play out her various scenarios, it doesn’t seem good for her character to spend that much time in a self-centered mode of play.
So, that leaves those more organized, structured activities as her other favorite way to spend time. All summer and some of last spring when I hadn’t done much planning, Madeline would ask if we could “get out the activity books” and look for activities to do. She also loves to do arts and crafts projects, but she seems to particularly like it if I give her some direction to start with (suggesting which type of art to do that day, for example). Coming up with things to do on the spot is exhausting, so having a lesson plan or a curriculum to use is much easier on me.
Random Thought #3: I may be proved wrong about this, but I think having a little bit of structured school time at home now for Madeline as a 4-year-old will help her adjust to the idea of doing “real” school a couple hours a day next year when she is actually kindergarten age.
Random Thought #4: If you are planning to homeschool beyond the preschool years, doing something somewhat more formal or organized for preschool gives you as a homeschool parent a chance to learn about your teaching and organizational style, your child’s learning style, and what you might like or dislike about different homeschooling styles, philosophies, and types of curricula. While I am by no means decided on what curriculum we will use when Madeline is in Kindergarten next fall, I feel like my research and our experimentation thus far with various styles of homeschooling have helped me cross certain options off the list while giving me ideas of other curricula I would like to research further in the next 9 months or so.
Random Thought #5: It’s really fun to harness the curiosity of a preschooler by helping them go deeper with topics they already ask questions about. Madeline is always asking lots of questions about the weather. Things like, “Why is it raining?” or “Why is hot in the summer?”. So, our first unit study has been about weather, and she is learning more about weather terminology, and why weather does what it does. Another example from the realm of art: Madeline has been trying to mix different colors when she paints, and I was getting really tired of telling her multiple times in an hour how to mix orange or green. So, we talked about primary colors and made a chart to post on the door of our art cabinet. Then she asked why the primary colors were primary — why couldn’t we make red or blue yellow like we can other colors. That answer had to wait for daddy to get home. I haven’t really broken the news to her yet that the real primary colors are cyan, magenta, and yellow and not red, blue and yellow as the kids art materials claim.
Coming up next or at least soon: helpful homeschool preschool links