How We Homeschool Preschool

As a homeschooler, I answer a lot of questions from friends, family, acquaintances, and even strangers in the grocery store. It's different than what most people are used to so there is naturally a lot of curiosity. And I love it. I love answering each and every question I'm asked. No matter who is asking or how many times I've answered the same question. I just love it. So, if you're somebody who has always had a question (or several) about homeschooling, ask me. I would be so happy to answer!

One question I get more often than most others, and this is probably just because this is sort of just my demographic right now, is, "How do you homeschool preschool?". Or, "What do you do with toddlers for school?". My answer has really evolved since Sam was 3 years old and I first started "homeschooling". Life has changed since then, but also my general homeschooling philosophy has changed a ton. It has happened bit by bit as I figured out what worked best for us, but it made a huge shift in the middle of last year when I was newly pregnant with Anna, feeling miserable, and way burnt out only doing Kindergarten. You can read more about that here, but basically I discovered and started researching a few styles of teaching that advocated for no formal learning before age 6. Already feeling stressed about mixing a 1st grade and pre-k year while also bringing home another baby, I took that and ran with it.

So, the short answer to, "How do you homsechool preschool?" is simply, "We don't." There are, however, plenty of things that I do intentionally do for the good of all my children really that could probably, for lack of a better term, be called our preschool "curriculum".

Quality children's literature.
We own tons of kids picture books and also try to get to the library at least once a month. Since discovering Charlotte Mason, I'm more careful about the quality of the books that we buy or check out of the library. I've heard other Charlotte Mason homeschoolers compare books to junk food or healthy food. Junk is fine in moderation, as long as you're maintaining a healthy diet otherwise. For our "healthy" books I look for beautiful illustrations, and good vocabulary. If I've learned nothing else from doing Charlotte Mason homeschooling this year, it's that children are far more capable of understanding a much wider vocabulary than we give them credit for. You can't go wrong with classics from authors like Robert McCloskey, Eric Carle, Jan Brett, and Ezra Jack Keats.

Outside time.
Some days this is harder than others, but we do our best. Sam and Kate are old enough at 6 and 4 to go out in the backyard by themselves, as long as they stay where I can easily see them out the back windows and stay out of the cornfields and front yard (we live on a back road, which means there are plenty of people who go flying by, well over the speed limit, so no front yard playing for us). That makes it easier because I can't always be outside, but I do make an effort to get Henry and Anna out there as much as I can too. Walks outside are good for everybody and provide endless learning opportunities for preschoolers (and everybody else!) We have nature journals and some field guides, and Sam does a little bit more of a structured nature study, but for preschool Kate is just exploring and I answer her questions if she has any.

Cooking and baking.
Again, endless learning opportunities without having to do anything special at all. I don't make baking a "lesson" at all, everybody just pulls a chair up to the counter and takes turns adding ingredients. They end up learning to count, seeing kind of how fractions work, learning what sorts of things need to work together to make food, what happens to certain things when they get hot or cold (like how water can boil and turn to steam or it can freeze and turn to ice). I have to cook anyway, why not let them help and learn without actually doing any planning or lessons right?

Music.
Our first grade curriculum includes monthly folk songs and hymns as well as composer studies. The little ones listen along to those and I also play a variety of music all throughout our days. Again, no lesson planning, but sometimes Kate has questions and I answer them. "This sounds different than the other one, why?" "Well the last one was a string quartet and this one is a piano solo." "What does quartet mean?" "4" "Okay." Just by playing a ton of music every day (a habit I started back when Sam was a toddler) I've noticed that Kate has a really good ear for music and picks up the emotions in different pieces. When she was 2 I was playing Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet and she said, "Mama, dis so sad." Sam is more likely to notice the volume of a particular piece and likes to pick out different instruments. Henry is already really good at catching the rhythm of whatever we're listening to and clapping or dancing fairly close to on beat. I love seeing all of the different ways they all hear and react to music! We also sing a lot of your usual preschool songs (and everybody really loves the 'days of the week' song!), but, in keeping with Charlotte Mason's philosophy, we really focus on quality! I think music is so important in any school at any age, but besides that, its very helpful at 'that' time of day before dinner and bedtime. I can have a little control over everybody's moods (mine included!) with the music I choose to play.

Art.
Sam has a scheduled picture study and Kate and Henry both like to look at whatever he's studying with him and play along when I cover it up and ask him to tell me what he remembers from it, but I don't make them. Sometimes they're not interested and obviously that's fine, since it's 1st grade work. I also don't plan or prep many crafts ahead of time for them. Drawing materials are always available and everybody is encouraged to use them. No formal drawing instruction or anything though. That, again, will start in first grade. Kate taught herself to draw flowers recently though copying out of a book about flowers that we have. I'm getting ready to teach Sam how to finger knit and I know that's something a 4 year old can easily do as well, so that will be a lesson where I will intentionally include Kate. Other handicrafts Sam has done, like yarn wrapped sticks and watercolors, Kate participates in if she wants to. She has her own pair of scissors that she is allowed to get out of the closet if she asks first, but I don't do planned "scissor skill" work or anything like that. Same with glue sticks, they're available (if they ask permission first) and they can glue whatever kind of creation they want to. So those are skills Kate has picked up on her own.

Life skills.
I think at the preschool age, it's just as important to teach life skills as it is to teach the alphabet. Sweeping, sink cleaning, vegetable and fruit washing, bed making, sock matching, drink pouring, snack making, and all things of that nature. This is all a little more in line with Maria Montessori than Charlotte Mason, although Ms. Mason was also an advocate for small children being able to do things for themselves. We don't do these things as lessons, I just make sure Kate learns the correct way to do them when they come up in life. Making her bed and cleaning the downstairs bathroom sink are her morning chores and she's getting pretty good at folding her extra blankets to lay at the foot of her bed!


In addition to all of these things that just happen in our daily life, I do have a few things put together that I can grab when Kate or Henry just have to do schoolwork like Sam. Or just when I need to occupy Henry long enough and quietly enough to get something accomplished with Sam. I have a bin of various beads, stones, beans, pom poms, pipe cleaners, etc and also a bin of little tongs, scoops, bowls, and cups. They can string beads on pipe cleaners, sort pom poms (or beads or beans or coins) by color or number into bowls or a muffin tin, pick up little things from one bowl with tongs and transfer them to another, all sorts of different little activities working their fine motor skills and keeping them fairly quiet. I cut up a bunch of cardboard rectangles and used glitter glue to write out the alphabet on them. They're fun (and pretty!) to play with and running their fingers over the bumpy, glittery letters is a pre-writing activity. Last year Kate had some matching games with laminated strips of paper and clothespins, but we haven't really gotten those out much this year. When Kate really wants to do school, we can do a ton with just one alphabet puzzle. She sings the ABCs, counts the letters, sorts them by color, traces them all with her finger, whatever she wants to do that satisfies her need to 'do school' that day. She also has a binder with laminated worksheets that she can work on with a dry erase marker, but we haven't used it in a couple months.

Something Charlotte Mason talks about a lot when she's discussing the 'early years' in her books is habit training. In most Charlotte Mason circles, when anybody asks what to do with the under 6 crowd, habit training, good books, and outside time are the top 3 answers. Habit training like attentiveness, obedience, orderliness, things you want your kids to know anyway, but you are just a little more intentional with it. For the habit of obedience we play red light green light or simon says. There are lots of ways to work on these habits through play (or schoolwork with older kids) and then they carry over into regular life as well.

So if the short answer to, "How do you homeschool preschool?" is, "We don't." the long answer would probably be that we don't really plan anything structured, but we make sure that the tools for good preschool learning are readily available. In addition to all of the things I've already talked about, we try to keep our playroom pretty 'open ended' (meaning little to no battery operated stuff) and our screen time minimal. I like to think that I'm giving Kate the tools to learn everything a preschooler should really be expected to know, and then letting her decide how and when to use them.

Every child learns differently. What works for one might not work at all for another, but this hands off approach can easily be tailored to different needs. Kate is not an especially self motivated learner. A big reason that we did attempt a more structured preschool with Sam was that he wanted to know all of the things and he wanted to know them immediately. I can see now though that he learned more and better when we stepped back from the structure and let him have more free reign. Even not being a very self motivated learned Kate has, in her own time, learned so much so far this school year. I was so nervous to be so hands off with her because she does tend to need more direction, but oh my goodness. She's flourishing! She is surprising me every day with things she is suddenly aware of and able to do. She learns at a very different pace than Sam, and different things click more easily for her than for him, but she's getting it all. Giving her the tools and the space to explore is giving her everything she needs. Today, for the first time, she got a piece of paper and copied the whole alphabet from our puzzle while I was doing a history reading with Sam. I was so proud and so relieved! It's hard to let go of your kids sometimes and let them figure things out on their own. That applies to schoolwork and a whole list of other things that I'm sure we're only in the extreme early stages of experiencing!

Preschoolers are amazing. And they are capable of so much more than we often give them credit for. They just need the space to do it!

I hope this post has answered some questions that I know many people have about homeschooling little ones and, like I said in the beginning of this post, I love homeschooling questions so please friends, never hesitate to ask!

What's Working and What's Not

We are 1 week into our third and final term of school for the year and, for the first time, I'm so happy with all of my choices and super excited to pick it all right back up again next year! This curriculum is just such a good fit for our family and I'm even seeing its positive impacts on my non-school aged littles. We all know toddlers and kids are little sponges, soaking up information all around them, and it has been incredibly amazing to see Kate and Henry soaking up all of the fantastic information being spread for Sam. How fun to hear your 2 year old count to 10 in French, unprompted, or to have your 4 year old tell you where the Saxons came from and what they did in ancient Britain!

As much as we are loving this curriculum and absolutely plan on using it for years to come, there are of course some little tweaks and adjustments to be made here and there moving forward. So today I'm sharing what has been really working well so far for us this year, as well as what hasn't.

What working: 4 day school weeks. The material we are scheduled to cover each week condenses well into 4 days and free days are nice to have, even though we get all of our work done fairly quickly on school days.

What's not working: Picking one day to always be our off day. At the beginning of the year I figured we'd just always take off on Thursdays since it tends to be our busiest day. That actually ended up feeling really restrictive and we homeschool specifically so we won't feel restricted by anything! Now I look at our schedule for the upcoming week and pick which day we'll take off, but sometimes I change my mind halfway through the week, and sometimes we actually just spread 4 days of work over 5 days. I don't even always chose our busiest day as our day off, occasionally we'll still do our scheduled schoolwork on a busy day, to give us a really quiet day at some point with nowhere to go and nothing to do. Flexibility. We love it.

What's not working: Morning being our only school time. This one kind of goes hand in hand with what I just said about our days off being flexible. At the start of the year I figured the day we were busiest in the morning would be the day we took off, since I didn't really want us to be doing school in the afternoon. I do still very much try and stay within our usual blocked schedule, but I've added schoolwork as a possibility into some of our later blocks.

What is working: Copywork and drawing upstairs during rest time, reading aloud to the little ones when I need a quiet minute, schoolwork in the lobby at ballet, schoolwork outside, reviewing word cards with me while I cook dinner. Again, flexibility.

What's not working: Trying to plan out activities ahead of time for Kate and Henry.

What is working: Flying by the seat of my pants, to be completely honest. Some days I tell them to go to the playroom and just play, some days I just toss a pencil and a piece of paper their way, some days I pull something from my bins of pre-school activities. A lot of days though they are both begging to "do school" and I've found I'm able to satisfy them with just our alphabet puzzle. We can cover letters, counting, and colors with just the one puzzle.

What's not working: Setting aside specific times for school readings. We started the year going to the couch to read, or reading while I nursed Anna. Life got busier as the year went on though and we needed to multitask more.

What is working: Reading during mealtimes (we had already been doing that from the beginning to some extent, now I'm just doing it more) and reading during clean up time. Reading to them while they clean up toys has been working really well. They focus on actually getting toys picked up rather than messing around when I'm in there with them and they focus on the reading because they're just cleaning and not playing. I've gotten some really good narrations from Sam during clean up and even Kate has chimed in with her own narrations sometimes.

What's not working: Picking and writing copywork each individual day.

What is working: Planning and writing out a full week of copywork on Sunday afternoons. I had planned to do this from the beginning of the year, but slacked off through the fall and into the holiday season and was trying to choose and write copywork every single morning. Doing it ahead of time in so much better especially because copywork is something Sam does pretty independently. He often does it in the morning after breakfast, while I'm doing dishes or dressing the little ones. On busy days he'll do it in his room during rest time. As long as it's coming back to me with nice, neat letter formation it doesn't matter to me where or when he does it.

There are also some things that I planned on doing from the beginning that we have continued doing all year because they're working extremely well. Namely: Bible, poetry, and prayers over breakfast and using toys to keep characters straight while reading Shakespeare.

Then there are also some things we've been doing a little, but that I want to do better or more consistently in this last term and next year. Nature study, for one. We do it, but not as consistently or as intentionally as I would like.

Handicrafts are something else I'd like to improve on. We've done a couple things here and there with great success and I'm really hoping that we can learn some new things and do them more often.

Yarn wrapped sticks were really fun and have really brightened up our dining room!

Something that my mom always did for us when we were homeschooling, that I'm hoping to carry on with my own family, was weekly poetry tea. It's also a very "Charlotte Mason-y" type of activity, but for whatever reason it hasn't been really high on my priority list. Probably has something to do with the whole having a newborn thing. 😉 We did manage to have our first poetry tea this past week and it was wonderful! Even Henry sat so nicely, carefully sipping his milky tea from a fragile tea cup and listening to me and Sam read poems out loud. I'm going to strive, for now, for poetry tea at least twice a month. When Anna's naps get more consistent we can try for once a week.

All in all, like I said before, I'm very pleased with how our year is going! We are managing to get all of our work done and still feeling very free and flexible, which is exactly what I was hoping for when planning this year. Sam is clearly learning so much and Kate and Henry are absorbing much more than I ever expected they would. I am looking forward now to finishing this year strong and am already doing some planning for next year!

2017/2018 School Year Plans!

𝅘𝅥𝅮𝅘𝅥𝅮 It's the moooost wonderful tiiiiime, of the year 𝅘𝅥𝅮𝅘𝅥𝅮

Anybody else hear this Christmas song in their head when all of the 4th of July festivities die down and stores start putting out their back to school supplies? I've felt that way my whole life. I LOVE summer and always feel sad when it's really coming to an end, but when I see the stacks of shiny new folders and notebooks in school bus shaped displays at Target, I get a major thrill. Everybody tends to think of New Years as being the time to make a fresh start, but to me its August/September. In January it's nice to get back into a routine after the holidays and everything, and New Years Resolutions are super fun, but it's still cold and gray and it's just the halfway(ish) point of school and kid activities. The beginning of the school year feels more full of possibility to me. What is our new daily routine going to look like? How can I make our days smoother? What extra curricular activities do I feel like we should sign up for? How will we make those particular evenings work best for everybody? And then the questions only homeschoolers get to ask themselves: What curriculum are we going to use this year? How will we structure our school days? How will we balance regular home life (laundry, baby naps, cleaning bathrooms, grocery shopping) with school time? FULL of possibility!

This year we'll be starting school a little earlier than we normally do. Normally I like to get started after Kate's birthday, August 20th. This year though, after Kate's birthday we'll be on official 'baby watch' for Baby4, so I want to get an earlier start. Starting tomorrow, 7/31, should get us about 4 weeks of school work before the week of my due date, at which point we'll start a break. I haven't decided yet how long of a break we'll take. Leaving that up in the air depending on when Baby4 comes and how quickly we settle into a routine. Our curriculum this year relies quite heavily on read alouds, so that should work in our favor with a new baby. I tend to do a LOT of reading out loud while I nurse a newborn anyway!

I mentioned in my last blog post that I had found a full Charlotte Mason curriculum that we will be using. When I first decided Charlotte Mason seemed like the way to go for our family, back in the spring, I was very pleasantly surprised to find Ambleside Online! It's a completely free resource that has schedules, book lists, composer studies, artist studies, and so much more available and organized by school year! Amazing and SUCH a blessing! Sam will be starting with Year 1, which is meant to be a 1st grade program and the first year of formal schooling, after the student has turned 6. Ambleside also has a very informal Year 0 (mostly just a book list) meant to be sort of a kindergarten year. Kate will do that next year, but we will likely read some of the Year 0 books this year for her pre-k year as well.

Our curriculum's main resource is the book list. The heart of a Charlotte Mason curriculum is literature and using 'living books' (rather than dry textbooks) to teach all subjects. This is done by reading (out loud in the earlier years, and then by the student themselves when they're older) and narration (oral in the early years, written in the later). It has been a BLAST collecting all of the books on the Year 1 list and I am incredibly excited to dive into these! Ambleside follows a history rotation throughout the years and begins Year 1 with early British history, to lead into early American history in Year 2.

Our books!!

In addition to our book lists for readings, we will also have a different composer and artist to study each term (Ambleside schedules their years into 3 12 week terms). For each composer and artist we have different pieces to study for 2 weeks each. This is to be really simple in Year 1. We'll listen to our selected piece from our composer of the term throughout the day, and I will have printed copies of our piece of artwork framed and ready to study. "Studying" the artwork will consist of looking at the picture for a few minutes, and then turning it away and seeing what we can remember without looking at it. 

We will also have a folk song to listen to each term, as well as a different hymn every month. The goal here is just to have kids memorizing these old songs, just by listening to them frequently as they go about their day. No special time will really be devoted to them.

Also essential to any Charlotte Mason curriculum is copywork. The goal with copywork is to learn correct formation of letters, as well as sentence and (later) paragraph structure. Sam will initially just be doing the alphabet in his copywork. He writes well, but I want to focus our first couple weeks on review and working on neater penmanship. Then we'll go on to copying out sentences from readings we've done that week. Sometimes I might choose some lines from Aesop for him to copy, then maybe something from our weekly Bible readings, and then maybe a few lines from one of our "free reads" like one of the Little House books or the original Peter Pan.

Our science will mostly be comprised of nature study. We'll be spending a lot of time outside, but once a week we will go out (in our yard or we'll take a field trip) intentionally with our field guides and sketch books (even Henry has one!) At first we will just work on drawing what we see, and maybe writing down a name, but later in the year Sam will be making little notes to go alongside his drawings.

Ambleside suggests parents choose their own phonics and math programs, so we'll be continuing with Learning Language Arts Through Literature and Horizons math. Our LA program might be overkill with everything else we're doing, so I might switch it out for a more simple, phonics only type of program as the year goes on. Sam already has quite a good grasp on reading though after only sporadic usage of the LLATL program last year, and he seemed to really enjoy the lessons, so it might end up working out just fine!

Other things we'll be including in our school year this year will be French (we'll be using The French Experiment  as a super basic introduction to the language, mostly just reading some short stories in French and then using YouTube to learn the French words for basic things around our house), memory work (mostly poetry and Bible verses), handicrafts (beginning sewing, finger knitting, soap carving, basic wood working, etc) and drawing. Sam is especially excited about drawing, and spent a long time pouring over the simple workbook I found on Amazon. I also ordered a couple coloring books to supplement our science and history readings.

For Kate (and Henry a little bit) this year I haven't prepared much of anything. We have tons of supplies for sensory and fine motor activities that I can put together quickly whenever it seems like they might want something like that. I have 2 bins devoted to this kind of stuff. 1 bin of tools (scoops, tongs, cups, etc) and 1 bin of supplies (beads, pom poms, pipe cleaners, popsicle sticks, etc) I also made them a set of sensory alphabet cards (so simple, just glitter glue letters on cardboard) to run their fingers over as a pre-writing activity.

To keep everything organized this year, I first majorly purged and cleaned out our crafts/school closet to be more functional. The cute cart I got last year to house supplies has to be kept in the closet now (because... toddler...) and I decided to fill it with everything we'll use every day, including books, rather than just all of our supplies. This way, instead of going through the closet shelves every day to find what we need, I just need to roll out the cart and everything is already right there. Pencils, markers, colored pencils, glue, readers, flash cards on the top tier and then books on the second and our math manipulatives in containers on the bottom.

I also put together 3 binders, one each for myself, Sam, and Kate. Mine contains all of our weekly schedules (put together in my own format from the weekly schedules provided by Ambleside), the breakdown of our composers/pieces and artists/pieces, lyrics for our hymns, as well as copies of Sam's memory work for the first term (poems and Bible verses).

Sam's binder has all of his lined paper for copywork, his laminated and blank maps for geography, copies of his memory work (once a Bible verse is memorized he will hi-light it and once a poem is memorized he'll draw a picture to go with it), some coloring pages to go along with a few of our readings, blank paper for when he wants to draw his narration to a reading rather than just tell it to me, and his personal timeline ready to be filled in. Ambleside encourages making a history timeline, either in a notebook or on the wall, noting (or drawing) when events happen as you come across them in readings. But, in the beginning of Year 1, they recommend starting with making a personal timeline to help build the idea of time extending over the years. So we'll be slowly filling in Sam's timeline, starting in 2010 when he started growing in my tummy and going all the way through this year, marking important milestones in our family's life. I'm really excited to see how this turns out!

Kate's binder is full of tracing and matching worksheets that I laminated so she can do them again and again. I also added a folder full of coloring pages I printed from Pinterest. I want her to stay occupied while Sam and I go through his work, and she wants to be independent and have her own "school". I think this binder will take care of all of that.

I am SO excited for our school year! Nothing I have planned seems time consuming (as I mentioned in a previous post, Charlotte Mason believed in NO MORE than about 15-20 minutes per subject and only about 2 hours, max for the whole day in the early years!) and everything I planned seems engaging and like it will easily fit into our life! That was main goal in planning this year, for school to fit into our life, rather than trying to fit our life around school. Hopefully I've accomplished this!