Homeschooler confession time! As I mentioned in today’s review of Monica Swanson’s book Becoming Homeschoolers, although I’m a big supporter of (and practitioner of, and historian of) homeschooling, I don’t go in much for homeschooling preschool.
In fact, I think it’s almost always altogether unnecessary.
The reason is that I am convinced that most young children do best when they are not required to do any academic work. There is much excellent research, however commonly ignored in conventional education, to suggest that early academic work does little good for a child in the long term and may in fact do harm. Learning the alphabet won’t hurt your average four-year-old, of course, but making him learn it will – and too often early literacy instruction takes the place of things that actually are essential at this age, such as stimulating the vestibular system, doing lots of heavy work, and developing large motor (and only then then fine motor) skills.
So it’s not that you shouldn’t show Johnny how to write his name if he wants you to, or that you should categorically refuse to tell Susie the sounds of letters, but rather that forcing these things at an early age is counterproductive. There is simply no need to plan to do school-style work with the majority of young children.
Yet homeschooling (and other mostly-at-home) mothers and fathers do still need a plan for their preschoolers’ days. You do still need some sort of strategy for occupying your young children during the school day, even if you have joyfully released yourself from the pressure to formally homeschool them. Because if you are homeschooling your older children, without some sort of plan for the younger one(s), chaos will quickly ensue. Without a plan in place, I can almost guarantee that your three-year-old will soon discover the joys of screaming and carrying on and whacking the toddler with her Montessori-scaled broom while you are distracted by teaching the six-year-old phonics. Or your four-year-old will quietly cover the bedroom wall with drawings in permanent marker while you are in the living room, teaching your nine-year-old about paragraph structure. Soon you will find yourself interrupting your teaching approximately one million times every single morning in order to give your preschooler your undivided attention and/or overreactive discipline.
This way lies madness.
In other words, although preschoolers may not need formal homeschool work, they do something non-destructive to do while you are A) homeschooling other children; or, if the preschooler is your eldest child at home during the day, B) trying to keep the toddler and baby alive and relatively happy.
What can you keep on hand to occupy your little cherub of chaos, this threenager who can suddenly run faster than you and apparently also can climb the bookshelves?
Better still, what can you who are blessedly beyond this stage give to your homeschooling parent friends who are currently wrangling one or more pint-sized monsters of destruction while also teaching older children?
Presuming the child already has magnetic tiles, blocks, duplos, and audiobooks galore, here are ten less-common suggestions from someone who has been there.
- A big rimmed pan, some cornmeal, and a set of minature trucks. Pour the cornmeal onto the baking sheet and show the kid how to drive the trucks through it. Toy soldiers are also fun. The kid can also just draw in the cornmeal with her finger. Bonus: the pan will come in handy for making ten zillion frozen bagel pizzas later in the day (homeschooling makes you hungry!).
- This tape activity book, which purports to have easily tearable tape. Get used to buying multiple rolls of tape at a time, too, in case you haven’t already, as Nadya Williams has recently explained, and go ahead and buy a weighted tape dispenser so that you don’t have to dispense the tape yourself for the younger ones.
- These scissors skills books, which my own four-year-old recently declared she wants to work on “for-evah” – although you will need to provide a real pair of scissors to go along with them, as these plastic super-safety ones are terribly frustrating. Remember to buy lefty scissors if the child is left-handed!
- A set of sensory mats, which the kid can put together as a puzzle and then roll over, or which, when separated and spread out on the rug, are wonderful for playing “lava floor” or other jumping games.
- A doctor kit for checking on sick stuffed animals, baby dolls, and Tonka trucks. Kids especially love to give their toys shots and to make them drink icky pretend medicine, and to make pillow forts or beds in which the invalids can recover (or malinger and then tragically die).
- For the preschooler who can’t stop spinning and knocking things over and generally filling up the room with his body, realize that this spinning is a need, not an annoyance. Offer a spinning chair or tree swing so that the child can stimulate her vestibular system without driving everyone else nuts. This wobble disc is a good indoor option.
- For the five-or-six-year-old who likes puzzles and coloring but is not yet ready to write lots and lots, this color-your-own puzzle kit is very fun. An adult or an older child will probably have to help assemble the puzzle before it is colored, as it is surprisingly hard to put a black-and-white puzzle together, but after that the child can color and then play with it independently.
- Similarly, this is a wonderful, high-quality coloring book for kids 4-9, if you’re into saints. (This book can be given along with it. It’s so beautiful!)
- For the child who is interested in math and wants to sit a little while and “work” along with the big kids, I like this early math book, which is mostly visual. You’ll need to read the child the instructions, but you can do that while also helping the older kids with their own math at the same table. Remember, too, that you don’t have to follow the instructions in the book if they are too fiddly – you can just tell the child to circle or count or color or trace things on the pages.
- Counting bears with cups and tongs! Preschoolers love to sort things and line things up. Bonus: the bears like to play on the cornmeal tray (see above), too!
Happy homeschooling – and don’t forget the snacks!