There are more and more parents choosing to homeschool their preschoolers. Some parents do this because they want to share their values with their children. Sometimes, there are some values that children pick up from schools that are against the parents’ values.
Sometimes, there are unavoidable reasons that parents need to settle for a homeschool such as a pandemic, like our situation right now. However, homeschooling a preschooler can also be exciting and fun for the children if the parents do it right!
Here is a list of the compiled top tips from us on homeschooling a preschooler.
Planning a Schedule
Plan and structure a daily schedule for your children’s learning. Do you know how to make this fun for your children? Discuss with them how their schedule should look like so they will feel happy to follow the schedule because they know they are the ones who decide the schedule.
Do not be so rigid when planning a schedule, be flexible. Change it from time to time to suit the needs of your children. When planning this, do not forget to have a break! Children also can get tired.
Another important thing when you are planning the schedule is to make sure you put hands-on activities such as art and crafts class in the afternoon where the children do not have to think about anything and they just need to have fun!
Set Goals
For homeschool, the goals are different from schools. As parents, you can set not only academic goals but also skill-related goals. For academic goals, you can set it as your children’s monthly goals while skill-related goals, you can set it as your children’s weekly goals.
For instance, for life skills, your children can learn to cook a meal until they can cook it on their own independently (make sure this is a simple recipe) and music skill, teach your children to master a musical instrument. Certain goals will need a longer time to be achieved and be flexible to extend or shorten the time period given to your children. Do not pressure them or else they will lose their interest in learning.
Play Time!
Through playtime, children are learning through playing games. Therefore, it is very important to make sure that there is time allocated for the children to play. But, as parents, you need to make sure that every game that the children are playing, they are learning or enhancing their skills.
For example, you may do a LEGO challenge during your playtime. Ask the children to build a tall building with LEGO. The children will be elated to complete this challenge because they like to play LEGO however during this challenge, children will understand that in order to make a tall building, a wide base is needed for the building to be stable.
Children also will enhance their fine motor skills through this activity. Thus, it is important to plan what are the games that you and your children can do during playtime.
Read, Read and Read!
To homeschool a preschooler is a big challenge for the parents at home. There are a lot of skills that the children must master before going to primary schools. One of the skills is reading. As for homeschool, parents need to make sure that children will have a reading session at least three times a week. But there are so many things to do! Parents can always do the reading session with their children at different hours, not necessarily during the homeschool period in a day.
For instance, parents can ask the children to read at night or during the weekends. In order to make your children be interested in reading, you need to prepare a lot of reading books available at homes such as storybooks, encyclopedias, poetry, nursery rhymes, and dictionaries! It will be exciting for the children if you set 1 hour or 2 hours for the whole family members just to sit together in the living room or reading room (if you have one!) to read.
Hands-on Activities (Science & Mathematics)
Learning through hands-on activities for homeschool is amazing and exciting because the lessons are memorable and engaging for the children. By doing activities, projects or experiments, children tend to understand deeply about the whole experiment, and it triggers them to know more. Yes, to Science for this!
But do you know that for Mathematics, we can also do hands-on activities? Yes, ALFA and Friends company proves that for our programme, Euler Maths! We have the kits needed for Science (Little Scientist programme) and stem kits for kids available to support homeschool, especially for preschoolers.
Nursery Rhymes & Songs
As parents, you know that children are very interested in nursery rhymes and songs! With the simple nursery rhymes and songs that are just plain fun, a lot of aspects are enhanced which makes these two are important elements that parents need to include while homeschooling their preschoolers.
From Humpty Dumpty, Wheels on the Bus to Peter and Jane and Itsy Bitsy Spider, there are the nursery rhymes and songs that are able to enhance the cognitive development of the children (due to the repetition of words and sentences), speech (able to discriminate different sounds and develop learning ability), reading (excellent foundation for young ages literature materials), language, creativity and many more aspects to be enhanced from songs and nursery rhymes.
So, are you ready to indulge yourselves and your children in reading nursery rhymes and rocking your body while singing songs?
Taste and Smell!
To homeschool a preschooler, you need to make sure that children have the opportunities to learn through tasting and smelling things! Have fun learning with senses and make sure you allow your children to have a chance to share their experiences with you at the end of the session.
Do not worry if your children are stuttering and rambling for words, because that is a part of learning. They are looking for the best words that they know to share their feelings or experiences with others. Prepare different foods that have different tastes and smells. Blindfold your children and let them guess what is the food that you have.
Have fun!
