Whether you have always planned on doing preschool at home with your little ones, or are all of a sudden finding yourself needing to teach preschool at home because of the school closures, I’m giving you some easy steps today to learn how to teach preschool at home to your children. I’ve taught preschool and created preschool products now for 5 years. I now teach it at home to my children, as well as send my son to an in home preschool. So I’ve seen both worlds, gained great ideas, and love preschool!
Each Family is Different
The first thing you need to learn, is each family is different. How you want preschool to run may look completely different than Jane down the street, or Susy on Pinterest. Pick and choose what works best from you from your favorite educators or home school families. Make it work for you!
First Step: Choose a Theme
For me, the first step when learning how to teach preschool at home to your children, is choosing a theme. You can do one theme a month, one theme a week, one theme a day. Whatever works best for you. But I find, if I have a theme to help me focus in on activities and ideas, it makes planning easier. Some of my favorite themes are:
Holidays
Teddy Bears
Transporation
Community Helpers
Space
Spring
Sports
Simply google preschool themes and you will find hundreds of ideas. You can also find my complete list of preschool themed curriculum below:
Second Step: Choose a Letter for the Week
After choosing a theme for the week, pick a letter to learn or practice for the week. There’s many ways you can do that. You can simply go alphabetically, you can go in order of simple to hardest to write, or you can simply add in new letters one at a time that your children doesn’t know. This is up to you. If your child knows all of the letters, plan on doing a letter review game or practice for the entire alphabet. You can find some free letter tracing pages below:
Third Step: Find Resources
For me, this is the most important and fun part of preschool. Now that you have your theme, and your letter of the week, sit down and think about what you really want to do that week at school. Here are things I always include:
Letter of the Week Practice
Number or Math Concept
Fine Motor Skill
Gross Motor Skill
Life Skill
Then, simply think through your theme and one activity to fit in each of those categories for the week. You can search on Pinterest, or make up your own activities. You can print pages or you can make your own. I do both! I make pages to print, but I also make simple to use activities like the one above.
Fourth Step: Sensory Bins
This is not a required step, but a step I love including. I have found that by incorporating sensory bins, my children and students have been much more interested in the lesson and what is going on. You can change the fillers to fit your theme, and you can use it to practice speech and language skills, letters, numbers, fine motor skills and gross motor skills! To find out more specifics on how I use sensory bins, go to the post below:
Fifth Step: Incorporate Art Projects
I always like to incorporate some type of art project each week. It might be something as simple as drawing a picture, or something a little more time consuming like this wind sock. Use Pinterest or google and search for ideas for simple preschool art projects. The one above was an easy windsock to go along with our spring them. To make:
Color a picture on a construction piece of paper
Cut strips of fabric and glue them with hot glue on the bottom. I found 4 fit perfectly
Glue the wind sock in a cylinder
Use yarn or other material at the top to make a loop
Hang it outside for all the world to see!
By incorporating an art project each week, it’s the perfect end to a theme and an exciting way to wrap up concepts you are reviewing. Now matter what you choose, you can learn how to teach preschool at home to your children. It takes a little trial and error, and a lot of patience, but with time it is completely worth the hard work!