This will be my first year of home educating two children, since Birdie is now 3 and ready to start more intentional pre-school activities. Our days are still full of play, with a bit more maths, literacy, and nature study woven throughout. This year is a chance for me to observe how he wants to learn so that I’m prepared for next year, when he’ll (somehow!) be reception-age and we will be starting home ed more officially with him. A pre-school year also gives me the chance to practice balancing the learning needs of two very different children, and find points where we can all learn together.
I don’t think that you need any curricula to support a preschooler’s learning. There are so many opportunities around all the time, and they are in a beautifully absorbent phase of development where information about the world sinks in effortlessly. A three year old is full of good questions about the world and would be well served by reading together, talking about the world and playing. This is the essence of what we will be doing this year!
I will be drawing on some resources to make my planning simpler and to make sure I’m remember to cover all the things I hope to introduce. Again, every family is different and each child will want to go about learning in a different way. Birdie likes to learn through stories and play, and he also likes to sit and do drawing and ‘table work’ for short periods to feel included in the work A is doing.
Maths
I love Kate Snow’s Preschool Maths at Home - it’s very straighforward and like all of her materials, filled with simple games that encourage mathematical thinking. We will play lots of counting games, using five and ten frames, alongside some DIY Montessori materials like spindle boxes. The opportunities for early maths are everywhere, but it helps me to plan out what I aim to introduce or review that week so I don’t forget to bring up numbers at different points throughout the day. We have a number of maths manipulatives on hand already: a Right Start abacus, Montessori golden beads, number cards, and unit blocks. I’ve ordered some larger dice and a wooden ten frame tray to add into our preschool maths kit.
Literacy
I love the look of Wild Reading and we’ll be starting it this year very slowly. Birdie doesn’t know many letters yet, so we will take as long as necessary with this and I expect to repeat the program next year including all the elements. Alongside this, I’ll be using the Heggerty Pre-K phonemic awareness program - a new one to me, but it looks brilliant. It has about 10 minutes of rhyming and word games per day, and I think it will be very easy to incorporate into life. I’ll also be drawing on the classic Montessori Read and Write for more initial consonant games and early literacy activities.
We have lots of early literacy materials on hand already that I’ll be arranging in a more welcoming way, especially our movable alphabet and sandpaper letters. As the year progresses, I’ll put together a wild reading kit if we get to that stage, with rock letters, a chalkboard, and markers for writing on leaves.
Most mornings, I’ll invite Birdie to do a page or two from either the Gentle + Classical Morning Binder (there is some early maths in this as well) or the Good and the Beautiful pre-writing notebook. Neither of these are secular, but the religious aspect is pretty minimal (one picture of Noah’s Ark amidst 30+ other illustrations). Your family may have a different comfort level with these materials though. Worksheet-type activities are absolutely not necessary for 3 year olds! He enjoys having some ‘work’ to do at the table with us while A is doing his work, and these are largely colouring-based sheets that are entirely optional.
Nature Study
Three year olds are so interested in their environment and it’s a perfect time to start nature study in earnest. For the past 2 years, we’ve loosely followed Exploring Nature with Children with A, and we’ll follow the same basic monthly nature themes for Birdie this year. I select one or two of the weekly topics to cover each month. In the autumn, we’ll be looking at seeds, apples, pumpkins, leaves, and fungi. At this age, nature study consists mostly of reading and observing in the natural world, and learning about seasonal living.
Additionally, I plan to spend the year slowly introducing Birdie to different British animals, supplemented by reading fiction like Beatrix Potter and Wind in the Willows. This printable by Fiddlesticks Education looks really fun to have on hand. I don’t have any specific British animal guides, but we’ll be looking at lots of pictures in the DK Natural History Book and reading about hibernation using Animals in Winter and Winter Sleep.
Ethics and Kindness
Birdie is finally old enough to begin my curriculum Growing Towards Justice, and I’m really looking forward to sharing the experience with those of you who are using it this year. An important part of developing compassion and awareness of others is learning that other people live in different ways, so we’ll be reading books this year about children around the world and the different ways they live, celebrate, and eat. This is How we Do It is a favourite of mine for inspiring curiosity about the ways different children live. We’ll choose a child every month or so to follow, and learn about his or her country, the foods they eat, the climate where they live, and what kinds of ways people celebrate in their country or region. A Taste of the World looks like a great resource as well. This will end up being a family-wide project, which is one of the lovely things about home ed!
The Arts
Visual art and music tend to be things we do as a family, and Birdie will be joining A in exploring elements of art like colour, line, and form. He has free choice of art supplies and we spend time together painting and drawing without any ‘lesson’ or goal other than enjoying and exploring the materials.
Due to Covid, Birdie’s not had the benefit of joining a preschool musicianship class, but we’ll be using our Colourstrings books and the seasonal Wynstone Press books to sing and play music games throughout our weeks.
Languages
Out of everyone in our family, Birdie is the keenest to speak French! He will join our home ed co-op French class this year and we’ll continue to read lots of books in French and watch kids’ programmes in French like Madeline and T’Choupi. He is very curious about Welsh as well, and is in the perfect stage to absorb it easily, so I am working hard to find a way to put him in more situations with Welsh speakers. As I mentioned in my post about A’s year plan, it’s surprisingly hard to find Welsh learning resources for kids here in Wales that don’t involve immersion school.
Everything else!
Everything else is most of what we will be doing: playing, reading books, adventuring outside, baking, riding bikes, watching birds, practicing communicating with people peacefully, and doing lots of practical life activities. I no longer set out specific practical life work for young children - our home is well adapted to children and there are lots of organic opportunities to do real practical life work. I will invite Birdie to do activities, or he will see an opportunity and take it. This year I expect he will want to do practical life work like putting away laundry, sweeping the floor, unloading the dishwasher, wiping mirrors, packing his bag to go out for the day, cleaning wellies, scrambling eggs, wiping his own face, and making his bed.