For homeschool moms, the pre-k years can either be full of societal pressure and unhealthy social media comparison OR they can be a time of true joy and wonder in your home. Here are 10 simple ways to take the pressure off of yourself and your child when homeschooling pre-k so that you can enjoy these lovely fleeting years!
Don’t Second Guess Yourself
Be confident in your decision to educate your preschooler at home. You made this choice for a reason and you are a very wise mama. The little years don’t have to be squandered away in a classroom. They can be fully enjoyed and treasured at home.
You, as an intentional parent, are fully equipped to teach your child their ABC’s and 123’s from the comfort of your living room. But, the joy of homeschooling pre-k is that you get to teach them so much more than academics. From potty training to people skills, the possibilities are endless. Your child is not missing out on anything by not going to a traditional pre-k problem. They are gaining the world by spending their days with you!
Add A Little Fun To Everyday
Keep the preschool years light and carefree. Take the time to sit down and enjoy your child. Put away your smartphone and your to-do list. Instill a love of learning a wonder in your little one by playing with them.
Here are some easy ideas…
- Sing songs throughout your day. Music adds a unique joy to the home. Don’t make every moment about instruction. Let your child hear you singing The Itsy Bitsy Spider, Five Little Speckled Frogs, Old McDonald Had a Farm, and all the other preschool favorites. These silly songs will make them giggle and stick in their heads. Most likely, as they pick up on the lyrics, you will hear them singing the same tunes throughout their day.
- Make bracelets with your kid. Stringing beads is an excellent fine motor activity but it’s fun too. Sneak learning and bonding into your child’s day by making jewelry with them.
- Grab some easy preschool games like Candy Land, Hi-Ho Cherry-O, Lil Lemonade Stand, and Memory. Set a 15 minute kitchen timer at some point in your day and play these games with your little one.
- If you have multiple children, purchase a big circle rainbow parachute and play preschool parachute games in your background. You’ll need many hands to hold this up on each side. Let your preschooler run underneath the parachute and play.
- Get out of the house. The beauty of homeschooling pre k is the time you get to spend at home, bonding with your children. But at the same time, sometimes moms and kids get cabin fever and just need a change of scenery for the day. I have lots of fun pre k field trip ideas in my previous post here:
Set Manageable Pre-K Goals
Instead of setting goals that dependent on your child’s academic ability such as “teach Jane to read Bob books by Spring” set manageable goals for yourself as a mom that depend on you. Here are some stay at home mom goal ideas for homeschooling pre-k…
- Read 2 picture books to my child at least four days a week
- Teach my child how to skip count by tens at breakfast
- Read one poem and one Psalm out loud while my child eats lunch 3 days a week
- Take my child on one preschool field trip once a month
- Schedule a playground playdate with friends every other week
- Get outdoors with my preschooler after lunch at least 3 days a week
- Teach phonetic sounds and letter recognition through flashcards after quiet time 3 days a week
- Let my child do a messy activity on Fridays (finger painting, water colors in the yard, writing in shaving cream, play dough, baking with me, simple science experiment, etc.)
- Help my child clean up their toys properly after quiet time with the goal of training them to do this independently in mind
These goals depend on us as moms, not on our kids. Some of them are anchored to times of the day that we could easily add them in. Also, none of them need to be done every day of the week.
Set yourself up for success as a preschool mama with manageable goals that you can feel good about. It’s not about how quickly our kids learn. It’s about us as homeschoolers showing up and laying the foundation for their education little by little, over time.
Teach Pre K At Your Child’s Pace
I like to lay the foundation for learning with my child very slowly. We read picture books together, talk about life, cook meals together, explore outside, and learn through play naturally. Little by little, I incorporate phonics instruction for 3 to 5 minutes at a time. We start to practice writing the first letter of my child’s name together in shaving cream. Then, eventually, we use a pencil. Over time, we add the rest of the letters. I leave index cards posted around the house that describe the object they are posted to. “Bed” “Toy” “Door” “Fridge”
We sort the blue, pink, and yellow beads as we made bracelets together. My preschooler points out that her slice of pizza is cut in the shape of a triangle. I ask how many pieces will be left if we each eat two. She gets excited and counts the leftover pizza.
We cozy up on the couch and read even more books because I simply love to bond with my child in this way. She counts the ducks in Ping’s family and finds things I ask her to look for on the page. She begins to ask me to find certain things and we both share a laugh.
“What does that say?” she asks one day on a drive, cluing me in that she is interested in reading and ready for a bit more. “Walmart,” I tell her, reading the sign.
At home, we begin to drill letter flash cards a couple of times a week over breakfast. Just one to three letters at a time, upper case and lower case. In the bath, she plays with foam letters, sticking them to the wall and finding the one that her name begins with.
Time passes and she goes through a season of just wanting to play outside. We don’t do very much in the way of formal academics that month. She builds forts, dresses up in princess costumes, jumps on the trampoline, and paints on a canvas beneath the shade of a tree.
Teaching Preschoolers To Read
Spring comes and she is a little bit older. I find her flipping through a picture book from the library very intently. I sit beside her and she reads me a sentence out of the blue. She’d never read that book before, nor did I know that she knew how to read those words. But somewhere along the way, something in her brain clicked. The light and enjoyable foundation I had been laying over the course of the year was culminating in visible fruit.
It may seem to some that my preschooler was beginning to read, but I realize that she began the process of reading long ago on my lap when we flipped through her very first board book.
So much went into this one solitary victory moment. It was the hundreds of books we read aloud together, the stories we listened to on CD in the car, the books she listened to during quiet time on days when she didn’t feel like napping.
It was the play dough letter molds at the kitchen table and the foam letters in the tub. It was the day her big brother wrote her name with a stick in the mud while they were playing and the letter stickers we peeled and put in her phonics book a little bit at a time over the course of many months.
It was the index cards around the house and the tiny letters on the beads we used to make bracelets. It was singing silly songs together and sounding out words phonetically whenever she asked how. It was the way she observed her older siblings devour books each day and the limited amount of screen time we have allowed in our home. It was the pictures she drew for grandparents and her shaky attempts to sign her name.
It was the stories we shared over breakfast and the alphabet soup we ate for lunch. It was the basket filled books at her bedside and the caddy of picture books in the bathroom. It was the time that passed and the growth that took place in her mind at exactly the moment that she was ready.
This scenario has happened with many of my pre k children. We learn little bits at a time and play a whole lot. Then, one day things just seem to click developmentally and they enter a new phase of learning.
Be patient with yourself and your child. Make tons of space for play. Help your kid to learn organically throughout their day and take breaks whenever needed.
Acknowledge Your Progress
The work of a stay at home mom largely goes unseen. Sometimes we feel like we have been on our feet all day long and yet, we have nothing tangible to show for it. Hours of our day was spent cleaning, but the house looks undone by the time our husband gets home from work. We read our children books upon books but the fruit of that is not visibly seen. Sometimes it is heard in our kid’s impressive vocabulary, but sometimes it isn’t.
The last I checked, no one was handing out monetary bonuses or gold trophies for the mom who breaks the world record of how many times a human can read Brown Bear, Brown Bear in one 24 hour period without losing their mind.
Something that helps me to realize the good work I am doing in my home as a SAHM is to take an account of my progress in the rearview. I like to either make a morning checklist of my mom goals and cross off each item OR write a journal entry the next morning about what went well the day before. This way I am fresh, rested, and more likely to have positive perspective going into my day.
I jot down things I did such as practicing memory verses with my kids, reading piles of picture books, teaching them to tie their shoes, and taking them on afternoon walks. These little things count.
This is the stuff that matters to me as a preschool mom and makes up the days of my little people. When I reach the end of my day and I am feeling discouraged by the pile of dishes in the sink and my lack of energy, I like to reflect on the precious moments I had with my children that day and all the time well spent.
What about you, Mama?
Did you teach your preschooler how to skip count by 2’s? Did you see her face light up when she remembered the sound that “t” makes? Did you get some math in, counting carrot sticks and doing simple addition with celery over lunch? Did you get your little one outdoors to play instead of turning on the TV?
Rejoice!
Take a minute to think about how your preschooler is progressing. Not all successes in homeschool pre-k have to be academic. Your kid may not be reading chapter books yet (and they don’t need to!) but are they using kind words with their sibling? Remembering to wait their turn to ask you a question? Learning to straighten out their blankets when they wake up in the morning?
Is your preschooler…
- Play independently for longer stretches of time?
- Flipping through picture books instead of whining for the tablet?
- Making connections between stories you read and real life experiences?
- Remembering to wash their hands after using the potty?
- Putting on a jacket, socks, and shoes instead of insisting on playing outside in summer clothes in the dead of winter?
These are wins. Reflect on them and celebrate.
Limit Preschool Screen Time
Nothing has made my preschoolers more enjoyable to be around than limiting their screen time. Young kids who get lots of screen time struggle in so many way. They are challenging to parent.
We are living in a time in which children expect to be entertained during their waking hours. Technology has taught our kids that boredom is uncomfortable and there are endless streaming options available at their fingertips during any given moment.
If you want a preschooler who knows how to entertain themselves, play independently, and combat boredom with good old fashioned creativity, my advice to you is to do a digital detox and remove screen time as an option altogether.
Life with littles is so much easier when you eliminate the screen time battle altogether. We can set limits, timers, and boundaries all day long but at the end of the day, tech is designed to rewire our children’s brains. Kids who get lots of screen time want more, more, and more. They lose creativity, feel uncomfortable with boredom, and have very limited attention spans. The deliberate dopamine hits they get from screen time teaches them to expect excitement and disdain the mundane.
Equip your kid with the skills to play independently and enjoy the simple things in life by taking technology out of the equation. An added bonus to limiting screen time for preschoolers is that you will save yourself the stress of tech related behavior issues, tantrums, and meltdowns.
Read To Your Preschooler
Need an easy way to connect with your kid, bond, and make them feel extra special even though you have a whole lot of responsibilities as a stay at home mom? Read to them.
Too busy? Does it feel like there is always a mess to clean up and the toddler squawks loudly every time you pick up a story? I get it.
I have a lot of kids. Just as one grows into a more independent stage, the youngest becomes a high octane toddler. There is more laundry than ever, I am educating bigs and littles, I like to cook homemade meals, and it’d be great to end every day with sanitary surfaces and some semblance of order.
We have a lot to do as moms. There are appointments and obligations. There is house work and heart work. Along with all the pressing needs, there are goals for the future that we are trying to chip away at one day at a time. We have foundations to lay and crumbs to sweep up.
In the midst of all of that, there is a surefire way to connect with our children and give them that quality time they crave. It only takes a few minutes a day, it will improve their academics, give them warm memories to look back on, and inspiration for free play. It’s reading out loud.
No homeschool pre-k day is complete without it. Grab a library card or start a collecting of thrifted picture books and read to your preschooler a little bit each day. This small investment has paid off dividends in my motherhood already and I am not even out of the elementary years yet.
Enjoy the pre-k years by reading to your children every chance you get.
Prioritize Mom Breaks
God made mothers strong and capable, but he did not make us superhuman. We need rest and downtime just like everyone else. If you are homeschooling pre-k, consider your mom breaks essential. They will provide refreshment for you and help you to return to your work of mothering littles with joy and a second wind.
If we try to be everything to our families 24/7, we are going to burn out. Our kids should see us modelling balance, adequate rest, and dependence upon the Lord. Make homeschooling more enjoyable by taking a little time to reset every day.
Set Up Play Dates
Although I don’t believe the lie that kids need to be in a classroom with 20 other children their exact age for 7 hours a day in order to be “socialized” I do believe that mom friends matter and that we were made to live in community. Play dates with good friends are what the pre-k years ought to be made of.
We have spent many morning at playgrounds over the years. The kids run freely, play on the equipment, fly down slides, pedal bikes, and ride scooters together for hours. We pack lunches, chat with friends, and go home ready for an afternoon nap. I absolutely love preschool playdates. They are a break for me as a mom. The sunshine and fresh air is good for all of us and the break from our normal routine is welcome.
Monthly playground dates with friends has made homeschooling pre-k very enjoyable to me as a stay at home mom.
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