Ok, friends…I have a confession to make.
I’ve had these blog posts about preschool/homeschool in my drafts folder for ONE YEAR. One year that I have had them sitting here and I haven’t finished them. Why? I’m not sure, but I think my greatest fear is that I would put A LOT of time into them and nobody would read them.
Well, you all proved that fear wrong yesterday! So many of you are excited and interested in preschool at home as a schooling option.
I know I’m not an expert, but I do want to share my experience. I do also have a degree in Early Childhood Education, so this kind of thing gets me REALLY excited!
I apologize in advance if this post is incredibly long. I am going to be doing a round-up of all the supplies/workbooks/materials that I have used in the past year for our preschool at home. I know this is a lot, but hopefully it will be very quick scrolling!
In order to know what level to buy, I looked up some basic Kindergarten level standards. I gave Tera a Kindergarten entrance exam just to see what she could do and what she would need to work on in this year before Kindergarten. I also looked up common core standards for Preschool/Kindergarten. I know that those are often hated amongst the homeschool community, but it gave me a good idea of the concepts and benchmarks that Tera should be meeting within the first year.
In my last post, I mentioned that I decided to not spend money on a pre-written curriculum, but I did spend some money on these materials. As with anything, the little things can add up quickly. Just remember that if you are desiring to do school at home, you don’t HAVE to buy much. Everything that I link up here is an affiliate link, which means that if you buy from this link I will get a small payment from Amazon.
BOOKS
I found that Tera and I thrive off of workbooks. I know that this is not the case for every child, but it really helped me to have some dedicated workbooks to sit down and work on each day. I based most of my core subjects (math, language arts) off of workbooks.
We used this workbook for our language arts. I found that Tera could work through 2-3 pages/day.
For Math, we worked through this book. Again, I found that Tera could do about 2 pages a day.
Once we had finished the above language arts workbook, I started in on our copy of Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lesson. Listen…some people love this book, and some people hate it. For us..it is working! It is not without it’s imperfections, but Tera is for sure learning to read from it.
When I started Preschool at home, I really wanted a foreign language to be part of our daily routine. Children learn languages so much quicker and easier the younger they are, but I have had such a hard time finding a foreign language curriculum that is not reading/writing based. I decided to go ahead and order The 1000 First Words in French. Sometimes we will sit down and just look through the pictures and point out the various things in English and in French. I don’t think that this is the most effective strategy, but it was fun to have this book on hand!
One of our favorite parts of homeschool this year has been nature studies! There are so many fantastic books out there for nature studies, but these are some of our favorites:
We also got a 3 ring binder and simply put our leaves/flowers on pieces of paper and put them into the binder
And last but not least…the one book that I used every single day and that kept me on track is a good teacher planner. I actually purchased mine at a local teacher store, but they can be found almost anywhere that sells school supplies!
CALENDAR TIME
A calendar is a MUST. This is where we sit down together and basically do a lot of preschool. We say the date, the weather, and work on counting. We may sing a song or two and then do some handwriting. I also read a poem or two out loud. I’ve linked our favorite activity books and our favorite poetry books below!
BIBLE/DEVOTIONS
One of the primary things that I really wanted to focus on during homeschooling is Bible time. For our Bible time we read from a devotional book/Bible, we listen to a Hymn, we pray for one country from Operation World, and we work on a Memory Verse
(I choose our memory verses from Seeds Family Worship Albums. That way we can memorize a verse that is already set to a song!)
MANIPULATIVES
No early childhood classroom is complete without the little gems that we teachers call manipulatives. Honestly, I’m just going to lump all the additional school supplies together here, because they are all useful and helpful! I’m not going to include links for most of these, because they are fairly self-explanatory!
Markers
Crayons
Colored Pencils
Glue
Unifix Cubes
Flashcards
Water color paints
Flower Press
Brain Quest
Maps
RESOURCES
Highlights Magazine (Subscription magazine service- we love going through this for one of our homeschool days!)
God’s Big World (Subscription Magazine service)
Teachers Pay Teachers (website FULL of resources to use for schooling. There is a lot of free stuff, but also you can feel great that your purchase is going directly to the teacher who designed the activity!)
Pinterest (just be specific in the search bar! Type FREE + Skip Counting + Worksheet/Activity)
Common Core Standards (remember, these are controversial, but for me it just gave me a good starting point to work towards)
Kindergarten Entry Standards (remember this is what we are working towards by the end of the year, so it’s 100000% fine if our children can’t complete the items on this assessment! That just means we as teachers/mothers need to put those things into practice so that our child can do it by Kindergarten!)
Aaaaaaannnnnddd…..that’s a wrap! For now. What are some of your favorite homeschooling/preschool resources?