Becoming your child’s preschool teacher is an academic extension of what you already do as a parent: teach. As a parent, you already have experience teaching your child, and teaching preschool at home is not incredibly different. The key to transitioning from parenting to at-home preschool teacher is to be engaging, structured, and flexible! The best way to foster a love of learning at home is to guide children through hands-on activities and give them opportunities to explore and express themselves. The following tips, tricks, and activities will inspire your own at-home, well-organized, and engaging preschool curriculum.
1. Establish a Daily Schedule
Having a routine or schedule is vital to ensuring a successful learning-at-home environment. Especially with preschoolers, timing and routine are important to get the most out of their attention spans. Typically a preschooler’s attention span is only 15 minutes, so your learning schedule should consist of a recommended three 15-minute-long learning sessions, broken up by equally long breaks that focus on movement or hands-on activities (examples given below).
While making your daily learning schedule, include your child in the process so he or she understands the importance of the routine. This will also help establish your role as teacher in the home setting, and ensure your child feels like he or she is in a learning environment. When constructing your schedule, remember to incorporate your other time demands, such as working from home or providing academic support for other children.
2. What Kind of Learner Is Your Child?
Determining the types of activities your child learns best from and incorporating these into your curriculum will reinforce positive learning experiences for your child. Does your child prefer visual aids? Hands-on? Auditory? If you’re not sure, ask your child the following questions:
- What is your favorite thing to learn about?
- Do you like art or outdoor activities better?
- Do you like hearing stories or watching movies better?
Pay attention to the answers and adjust your learning curriculum to fit your child’s needs. If your child is having trouble sitting still while learning, increase the frequency or duration of your movement breaks.
3. How to Start the Day
Beginning your child’s day with morning mindfulness is a great way to establish routine and prepare for learning. Transition into songs or chants about the alphabet or letters to provide a foundation for learning these concepts. Here are some examples of morning mindfulness:
- Taking three deep breaths
- Stretch up to the sky and down to your toes
- Choose a positive theme statement and repeat it each morning; for example, “Learning makes my brain grow.”
- Sing the alphabet song or chant the alphabet and say what sound each letter has, such as: “A” says /aaaa/, “B” says /bbbb/ etc.
- If your child has the alphabet down, recite the alphabet, but for each letter, say a word that begins with that letter (a=apple, b=banana…).
4. What to Teach?
It can be overwhelming to plan a preschool curriculum by yourself. The basics are a great place to start. Begin your reading curriculum with the alphabet and beginning sounds and your math curriculum with basic counting 1–10. Add one letter and number each week until you have successfully incorporated all 26 letters and numbers 1–10.
Sample Preschool Curriculum
- Evan-Moor’s Homeschool Curriculum Bundles PreK
provides everything your child needs for practice of essential skills for preschool (ages 4–5 years). The fun illustrations, interesting themes, art projects, and hands-on and written activities will keep your child engaged in learning important PreK skills—and get ready for kindergarten! Each bundle includes:
- 11 colorful activity books and flashcards
- Activities that cover basic foundational skills for reading, writing, language, math, science, geography, and critical thinking.
- Downloadable Homeschool Teaching Guide with teaching tips and activity ideas.
Activity Books to Enhance Your Preschool At Home
Early learning resources are not hard to find, but finding the one that best fits you and your child’s needs is important. Here are some links and descriptions for Evan-Moor’s early learning workbooks:
- Skill Sharpeners: Reading for PreK provides basic reading exercises, focusing on one letter at a time. Within these fun and colorful activity pages are reading comprehension, vocabulary, phonetics, and other fundamental skills to practice reading basics.
- Skill Sharpeners: Math for the PreK level introduces numbers 1–10 in short educational activity pages. Each unit has a theme to keep things interesting and provides excellent math practice at home.
- Skill Sharpeners: Science uses songs, rhymes, and hands-on projects to teach preschoolers about different types of science! They’ll learn about life science, earth science, and physical science, all with fun activities and simple concepts that they’ll see in their daily lives.
- Skill Sharpeners: Grammar and Punctuation for PreK provides fundamental instruction on grammar and punctuation concepts like types of words, periods, and capitalization. Using riddles and word games, the workbook presents and practices these fundamental concepts for early learners.
- Smart Start series: The Smart Start series for PreK presents three different workbooks, each focusing on a different subject area. These activity books specialize in early learners and supply a balance of fun activities and worksheets. Check out each title below:
5. Hands-on Learning Activities
Though including workbooks in an at-home curriculum is important, teaching such a young age group means that a balance of materials is essential. Preschoolers have a very short attention span, so overdoing it on hard copies of worksheets may turn them off to learning. It’s important that you include plenty of hands-on activities to balance out your workbook load. Check out some of the learning activities we recommend below:
- Scavenger hunt: A small scavenger hunt can be adapted for any type of preschool learning! Place numbers, colors, or animals throughout the house or yard and have a scavenger hunt to find them. This will practice recognition of each color or animal. Practice counting the number of items you find. You can also say the name of the animal and identify the letter of the alphabet it starts with.
- Practice letters with playdough: Create tactile learning experiences by using playdough to form alphabet letters.
- Sorting colors: Use a pack of colorful items such as pompoms, M&Ms, skittles, etc., and pour them all out on a table or plate. Practice naming colors and sorting them into piles, and then practice counting each pile. This will also practice fine motor skills. Once your child understands numbers 1–5, you can have him or her count out 1–5 of each item.
- Music time: One-on-one music time between parent and child is an excellent activity! It’s hands-on and engaging and can get them interested in music. Create your own instruments with paper plates, cups, and dried beans.
- For more hands-on learning for preschoolers, check out the blogs linked below.
Kindergarten Readiness Checklist: What Does My Child Need to Know for Kindergarten?
6. Creative Time
Designate time that is specifically for your child to express his or her creativity. This can be time when you are doing something else nearby, or working alongside your child, but encourage your child to work independently in order to express him- or herself. Here are some ideas for creative time:
- Drawing or coloring
- Making or playing homemade instruments
- Building with blocks or Legos
- Molding with playdough or clay
- Alphabet Puppets: Create fun puppets for each alphabet letter your child learns.
- Jumbo Fun with the Alphabet: Introduce letters and letter sounds with the fun hands-on activities provided in this e-book.
- Paper Tube Zoo: Create animal-themed art in this fun hands-on activity! Act out a story with your paper tube zoo!
7. Exercise
Exercise and movement breaks are essential in at-home learning. Pay attention to your child’s preferences and schedule your movement breaks around when he or she has the most energy. Movement breaks can be a number of things, depending on what your child enjoys. Maybe your child enjoys running around alone in the backyard, or perhaps being sociable with family members and exercising together is preferable. Cater to your child’s needs to maximize these movement breaks and leave your child ready to learn again.
You can also use your exercise time to practice math or science. For example:
- Hopscotch and counting
- Counting things in nature like flowers, bushes, trees, etc.
- Observing animals and nature outside
- Set out colored or numbered cones. When you call one out, your child has to race to that cone! Great for awareness and recognition.
- Play Simon Says with active commands like “hop,” “jump,” “run,” etc.
- Jump rope and count your jumps!
8. Social and Emotional Learning
When children are out of their normal routine and without a traditional school setting, it’s important that they are properly managing stress or anxiety. Provide your child with a notebook or journal where he or she can draw and have quiet time during the day when he or she can reflect about the day. This small and simple activity will help provide stress relief.
9. Read, Read, and Read Aloud!
Reading aloud is one of the most important parts of forming language skills for early learners. Schedule daily read-aloud time for you and your child (or other family members) to help form vocabulary and a love of reading. Children will also start to recognize what fluent and expressive reading sounds like. Here are some of our favorite read aloud books: (include book title images: these are already in WP from another blog)
Chicka Chicka Boom Boom by Bill Martin, Jr. and John Archambault: This fun book introduces children to sounds and letters and provides an opportunity to practice letter sounds and recognition.
If You Give a Mouse a Cookie by Laura Joffe Numeroff: Enjoy colorful illustrations that pair with this fun story about a small mouse.
Franklin and the Tooth Fairy by Paulette Bourgeois: Franklin is a character in a series of children’s stories and often faces problems that most children may face. In this story, Franklin is frustrated because all his friends are losing teeth and he is not. These stories help provide children with coping strategies and stress relief.
My First Bob Books: Pre-Reading Skills by Lynn Maslen Kertell: This is a beginning reader book for young children who haven’t begun to read yet! It fosters young readers and beginning reading skills and encourages a love of reading.
Mixed by Arree Chung: This is a fascinating story about how separated colors, upset by something one of the other colors said, finally join together and make beautiful new colors. This is a great story about diversity and working together.
Thank You, Mr. Panda by Steve Antony: This is a book about gift giving and showing gratitude, and really displays the sentiment of “it’s the thought that counts.” Along with colorful illustrations, this is an excellent story.
Teaching preschool at home can be overwhelming, challenging, and exhausting. The good news is that it’s really hard to mess up! Just focus on spending time with your child in a scheduled and structured way, going over the basics and spending lots of time reading and being creative.
Check out 10 Tips for Teaching Kindergarten at Home with Evan-Moor
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Christine Wooler has experience working with children as a youth soccer coach and summer camp counselor. She is currently studying English Literature and journalism in college. She enjoys exploring educational topics that help students have fun while learning.