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Whether you’re working with your preschooler exclusively or trying to find educational activities to keep them occupied while homeschooling their older siblings, homeschooling your preschooler can actually be a lot of fun for both of you.
The biggest question though, is what to teach them.
First and foremost, it is important to remember that preschoolers learn best through play. Strict academic style learning is only going to slow their progress and more than likely make them resent learning.
At this age, it is so easy to build and foster and early love of learning, and embracing that will make homeschooling so much easier in the long run.
While we do try to make our activities as fun an engaging as possible in our own home preschool, there are still a few objectives, or goals, that we like to reach by the end of the preschool year.
Goals for the Preschool Year
- Recognize the uppercase letters of the alphabet. This is not to say that we don’t include the lowercase letters in our activities as well, you can tell from our alphabet book that we do, but at this age, the uppercase alphabet is our main focus.
- Know the days of the week and the months of the year. This is a skill that we practice daily through simple songs and our home preschool calendar board.
- Know the six basic colors. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple. These are super simple to teach with a few rainbow activities and are always a lot of fun.
- Know basic geometric shapes. Circle, square, triangle, rectangle, star.
- Building language skills. Both listening skills as well as vocabulary through reading, story telling, and more.
- Develop fine and gross motor skills and improve hand-eye coordination.
- Learn to identify same and different. We practice this skill often with memory matching games and find the difference pictures.
- Practice seriating. Seriate means to arrange a set of items in sequence according to a pre-determined criteria. So, for example, placing objects in order from smallest to largest or shortest to tallest.
- Practice 1:1 correspondence.
Now, if you’re starting home preschool with a younger 3 year old, you would probably cover fewer of these than you would with an older 4 or even 5 year old that is getting ready to enter kindergarten, and while this is obviously not an all-inclusive list of everything that may be covered in an entire school year, it makes a fantastic starting point for homeschooling your preschooler.
