I'm not sure if I've ever mentioned it here in any of my posts, but Mark and I are planning on homeschooling our girls {and other kids we hope to have one day!}. We have several reasons for wanting to keep our kids home that I might explore in another post one day but for now I just wanted to share what we're doing for Reaghan for Preschool.

I got a little work book for her last year that we went through, learning her letters, numbers, shapes etc. and we kept it very flexible and fun and only did 3 days a week with lots of crafts! I really believe that preschoolers learn the best through play and following along with their parents as they go throughout the day, so that was our main focus last year. Reaghan did really well with that and by the end of last year she could recognize all of her letters knew the sound that they make. She can also recognize numbers up until 10 and can count to 50. She knows basic shapes and colors. She can say the days of the week and the months of the year. She knows how to spell her name, knows her address, understands patterns and rhyming, and she's memorized several scripture verses. I think thats pretty good for a 4 year old! I say that not to be boastful but to encourage you that preschool doesn't have to be stressful or overly formal for your kids to learn!

The most beneficial part of our sit down "formal" school time last year was growing her ability to sit quietly and still and pay attention, but like I said, we only did the sit down stuff 3 days a week and for no more than an hour in the morning.

This year we are still keeping things simple, fun and flexible but adding in a few more formalities to prepare for Kindergarten next year when we'll be spending a little more time on various school subjects. I was home schooled all the way up until college, along with my siblings so I have a lot of experience with how you can go about the process of homeschooling... BUT this IS my first rodeo when it comes to actually teaching and being responsible for the education of my own child! I am obviously not an expert by any means and I know I'll be doing a lot of experimenting over the years to find our teaching and learning styles. Expertise (or lack thereof) aside, I still think its fun to read about how other moms home school, especially for the preschool/PreK age, so I thought I'd share our plan for this year! (There are so many creative mama's out there that I've borrowed ideas from so I'll link back to their pages so that you can be inspired too!)

We are still only going to do 3 structured days for about an hour and a half in the mornings.

We start our school time off with circle time and circle time starts with our bible story for the day, memory verse of the week and small prayer time. This is a great time to practice closing eyes and folding hands for praying -  in essence teaching them to sit still and quiet. Lilly is 18 months old this year so she's participating in our circle time and is in the thick of learning how to sit still! It's not her favorite pastime, but hopefully our school time will help grow her attention span.


This year I made a circle time board that I found from this mama on pinterest. I "surprised" Reaghan with it on our first day of school and she loved it! It has a calendar, the days weather, our letter of the week, number of the week, memory verse of the week and character trait of the week, and a 100 days of school countdown. After bible time we review all of the things on our board. We have a song for the days of the week and months of the year and we cross the day off of the calendar. We go outside and take a look at the weather and report it on the board, we briefly review what our character trait means and how we can practice it that day and then recite our letter and numbers.

After our "circle time" is over Lilly is allowed to get up and go play while Reaghan and I work in her work book. I just picked up a pre-K book from Costco that has tracing for all of the letters in the Alphabet, numbers 1-10, shapes, colors, phonics, and an adorable little science section!

We are going to do a letter a week as well as a new theme a week. (That's the plan anyways! There might be some carryover into the next week, Pre-K is flexible like that!) Our theme for this week is simply "back to school" and we'll do a craft relating to that. One week will be Ocean, another transportation, etc. Our character trait is going to coincide with the letter of the week. For example, for week 1, "A", our character trait is attentive. (Which is perfect since we've had a recent string of little girls getting hurt from running into walls or falling off of the bathroom step stools because they're doing things too fast and not paying attention! They may have inherited this from their mama so it'll be a good reminder for me this week too!) Since Reaghan can already recognize her numbers up until 10, our number of the week will be 2 digit numbers. I think I'm going to start off by counting by 10's. (Week 1 will be 10, week 2 will be 20 and so on.) We'll do the things in the book that correlate with our letter or number of the week and if the book activities are super easy than I'll add to it with some printables from pinterest. Pinterest is a preschool gold mine! So many fun ideas like this one...



Back to our schedule - After I'm done helping Reaghan with her book work I decided to add in some independent work for her this year so she can practice critical thinking, figuring things out on her own, and staying focused without mommy's help. To accomplish this I made her a Busy Book Binder that I found from this mama! My plan is that she will spend about 10 minutes working on an activity or two in her binder while I do something intentional with Lilly like reading her a couple of books, doing puzzles, shape sorting, stacking, anything along those fine motor skill activities or reinforcing the things she's learning throughout the day like counting, or animal noises or even her letters by the end of the year!

After that, we will do our science sheet and then we put our books away and play until lunch! Today's science "experiment" was blowing items through a straw to see if they would move in the "wind" but first predicting if an item would move or not before we blew it! Reaghan and Lilly loved it, so simple and fun but introducing critical thinking and making a hypothesis without going over their head!

I love school. I was a book worm growing up, I enjoyed learning and studying and I can't wait to pass that on to my kids and teach them from all of the books about language, arithmetic, history, science and more as they grow! I also love routines and schedules. If my days could run like clockwork with tasks compartmentalized by time blocks I would love it! But kids don't work like that. Especially not preschoolers. So again, I'm a HUGE proponent of learning through play and everyday life when they are little. I think it's so important for their brain development, more so than tracing letters in a book. Structured time is good and necessary for teaching our littles how to pay attention and how to sit still but it's not the be all end all. There's actually research that shows that kids that have more play based learning during preschool and kindergarten reap long term benefits from self initiated activities and problem solving. I've also read research that says trying too much structured instructions can have negative effects on kids that aren't ready. They can feel stress if they aren't able to do whats being asked of them which can lead to a decreased motivation for learning as they grow. Reaghan is very sensitive and doesn't want to fail or disappoint. I have to be very careful not to get frustrated if she isn't understanding what I'm asking her to do because I don't want it to be a big deal. (...this opinion definitely just applies to preschoolers. One day, sooner than later, she'll have to learn how to handle stress, expectations and failures! But for now, for school, it should be stress free for a 4 year old!) I want my kids to use their imaginations in play, problem solve as they do puzzles and build legos, and play outside in the sunshine and even the not so sunshiny days.

There's plenty of time for structured learning in the years to come!


Whew. If you made it this far, thanks for reading my ramblings on Pre-schooling at home! It was a little long winded! I'm excited to get back in to a good morning routine with the girls, cut out some of the TV time we enjoyed over the summer and play and learn together. I see my Reag growing up so fast and I know how precious this simple preschool age is. It can be tiring sometimes, but it truly is simple. We don't need to make it more complicated than necessary! Preaching to myself here!