Preschool at Home: The Goal

Exactly a year ago, I embarked on our homeschooling journey.

A year ago, our oldest daughter turned four and I decided it was time to officially start some type of schooling each day.

A year ago, I really thought that I had the future of my child’s education figured out.

I’ve learned a lot in a year!

We have completed one year of homeschooling: preschool. As I geared up to start preparing for Kindergarten at home, we found an alternative schooling method called a university model/hybrid model. I have to laugh at myself because just one year ago I would have declared myself a homeschooling parent. And now I’m like “ehhh….I don’t know if I could call myself that.”

Either way, I thought I would share here what we have done for Preschool at Home.

First, I seriously considered several curriculum options. The ones that stood out to me were:

The Good and the Beautiful
Timberdoodle
Sonlight
My Father’s World
The Homegrown Preschooler

I also briefly considered just making my own eclectic curriculum by paying for different math, language arts and activity curriculums.

After considering the curriculums and the various items I could use to make my own curriculum, I ultimately decided to not purchase anything. My main decision in this was the price. I decided to take our first year of “homeschooling” to see how it goes, and not worry about getting the curriculum just right. Ultimately, I decided to make the first year of “homeschooling” all about HOW to homeschool and less about WHAT I should be homeschooling.

My goals were to discover several things:

Could I carry through with a homeschool routine myself, or will I struggle to make it happen on a daily basis?
Could I teach my eldest daughter, or would we clash personality wise?
Could I handle teaching one child with two other children playing/crying/eating/needing my attention?
What subjects am I good at, and which ones do I really struggle with?
Can I educate my child without spending a lot of money on curriculum, or is it worth the money spent on curriculum?
How can my husband participate in homeschool?

I can confidently say that after this first year of homeschooling, I answered most of those questions! Yes, I can carry through a homeschool routine myself, but it looks a lot different than I imagined in my mind, with more days off than I would have planned. Yes, I can teach Tera myself, but I also think that she will EXCEL in a classroom setting. I can handle teaching one child while the other two clamor for my attention, but it is a challenge. I am really good at the core subjects- math, reading, writing, calendar time. I struggle more with arts and crafts and extracurriculars. I can educate my child without spending a lot of money, but I can also see where it would be incredibly beneficial to me to have someone else do allll the planning work! And, yes, Theo can be a very active participant in a homeschool schedule, which is something that we LOVE for our family.

Since I decided to not go with any formal curriculum, I had to sit down and decide what was important to me to include in our homeschool days. For some, the goal is to teach their child to read and write before Kindergarten starts. For some, they want a plethora of arts and crafts to keep and store while their children are young. The goal is different for each family. For our family, the goal was:

Language Arts
PLAY
Math
PLAY
Music
PLAY
Nature
PLAY
Poetry
PLAY
Language
PLAY
Bible
PLAY
Social Studies

Did I mention PLAY?!?

Obviously, I cannot implement all of those subjects into our daily preschool schedule. In fact, I learned this year that FIVE MINUTES is about the time that should be spent on one preschool subject. That is FIVE MINUTES. FIVE. I’ve found that Tera can do about four “subjects” before she really starts to lose her attention span. That means I have about 25-30 mins MAX to do “formal” school each day. The rest of the time? I am working to implement teaching into daily tasks.

I had big plans for how these goals would work out, and it turns out that preschool actually looked a lot more like play in our house than structured planning activity. Tera has learned so much about nature and birds and flowers from watching my bird feeder and walking our hiking trails. Tera has learned all about community helpers from watching our community recover from a tornado AND a mass shooting. She has learned about language from her grandparents who spent so much time reading to her and saying French words out loud to her. She has learned a lot about music by listening to the radio while we drive in the van. Some of those subjects have been implemented in specific ways, but most have just come more naturally to her.

Since this post is already very long-winded, I will wrap this up here. Coming tomorrow: What we ended up using for preschool homeschool (Part 2) AND our homeschool routine (Part 3)!

Perhaps you are reading this post because you think you may want to homeschool, or at least do preschool at home, but you just aren’t sure where to begin.

First, define your schooling goals. What do you want your child to learn? What subject matter is most important to you/your family?

Next, define your personal questions/unknowns/goals. For me, my main question going into this was if I would be able to homeschool one child while caring for two others. It really helped me to have that question asked before I began so that I could determine the answer throughout the year.

Next, determine your price range and if you feel comfortable using curriculum or not using curriculum.

The final step before beginning school at home is to find your curriculum/supplies! This step is fairly thorough and is absolutely up to each individual family.

Come back tomorrow for my post on what supplies and materials we have used for preschool at home!