Homeschool Preschool

Homeschool Preschool, it's a topic of quick division amongst homeschool families. To do it or not to do it? I've swung to both sides of the pendulum, but I'm currently under the persuasion of including Preschool lessons into my little ones daily routine.

My main reason being that my little kids easily get ushered around here and there as I'm bustling around trying to manage our home and educate my six older children. I want to spend time with them and include them in our day. I find that they love to have their own little 'school' time and it really doesn't take much time out of my day. Plus, I like knowing they're getting a head start on their academics and getting into the habit of how to do 'school' for when they get older. 

When I had only one or two under five I did 'calendar books', which were a compilation of a traditional 'circle time' activities that I would do one-on-one with each of my little bitty ones. Now that I have four in that age bracket, I created a circle time board which we use together (saving a lot of time doing it once as opposed to 4 times). It's more of a fun approach with songs and hand motions to get the children involved and learning.

This year our circle time board includes:

• A welcome, good morning song which we do first to try to get everyone focused.
• A days of the week chart
• A weather song; we sing the song and then discuss the weather 
• A letter chart where we sing the alphabet
• A months of the year song
• A monthly themed fun song 
• A calendar where go over the month and day. For whatever day it is we clap the number, stomp the number, and whisper the number
• A weekly color, shape, and letter. The color and shapes have a matching poem
• For the weekly letter we have a motion activity card (for example: letter C we shiver acting cold)

While I love this circle board and we're having loads of fun with it, AND the children are learning from it; I already have plenty of updates I plan to implement next year. Some of our circle time activities I created, found for free on Pinterest, or found at Teachers Pay Teachers.

I made up these homeschool 'week at a glance' schedules to help me keep up with our table time and preschool time. Our preschool time includes story books, usually two or three that I have collected over the years. The children watch an education movie, we have a weekly sensory box, and they have worksheets/crafts that we do together.

These are the preschool educational movies we rotate between.

One year I bought the Abeka preschool program (yeah, that was not our cup of tea) and it came with these awesome letter posters and letter songs CD that coordinates with the posters. They're a lot of fun and the children love doing them, so we do that along with our circle board time.

Each week I rotate our sensory box, with a new theme each week. Tabitha (my 13 year old) lets the little ones play in the box (supervised) during her block of watching them each day. The sensory box is not left out for free play, it is put away each day.

The worksheets that I do with them is dependent on their age. For my two year old, she does a series of worksheets I created that review the weekly letter, shape, color, and number. My three year old does a set of worksheets that I purchased from Teacher Pay Teachers. The projects I do with them include a lower case and upper case craft each week that coordinates with the weekly letter. 

Every few weeks we have an 'off week' where we do not do a weekly letter, number, shape, or color. During that week we focus on seasonal themed crafts which I found on Pinterest. I will share in the future all about our 'fun themed weeks' and the activities we do.

I try to keep our preschool time play based and more like fun schooling. I don't want my little ones to be burden down with 'seat work' and flash cards. Not that those things are bad, but they're not exactly fun for small children. It's taken many years of trial and error to come up with what works for our family and this is finally exactly what I've been trying to create for 15 years! Even though I still have some tweaking I plan to do in the future, lol. I guess that's par for the course for homeschooling a large family. What works for one family won't work for another, but I love seeing what other families do for their homeschooling, so that is why I'm sharing our Homeschool Preschool routine. 😊

With Love & Hope,

Jennifer