Homeschooling a Preschooler, Part 2

As promised, here is the second column that I wrote for The Barrow Journal on homeschooling a preschooler. In it I write some specific examples of what I do to teach my son, such as activity books, games, puzzles, and some of the arts and crafts we do. Next week I’ll post the third column, which focuses solely on the online resources that I have used with him.

Click here to read the full column, or you can scroll down to see some related links and photos.

One of the activity books we have used…. It’s probably the most “school like” thing that we do.

My son and nephew playing a game together. We love games and puzzles, and we use a lot of them. To learn more about the benefits of playing puzzles, click here. To learn about an easy sight word game I invented, click here.

When I first began to wonder what kind of arts and crafts I could do with my son, I discovered that he didn’t like to paint or draw, but he liked using scissors! He cut up small bits of paper, so I began to use those scraps to make paper animals. This is the first one I made. He calls it his “rainbow fish” after the popular children’s book of the same name.

I try not to spend a lot of money on homeschooling, but not long ago I invested in a laminator. I got this one on Amazon for about $30, and a packet of 50 laminating sheets for about $11. The sheets will last a long time. I’m very happy with it, and I think that it’ll be very helpful over the long haul.

This is one of the projects we did with the paper animals. We learned all about what kinds of animals live in trees. On our first day of making the tree, we took a white sheet outside and shook some branches over it. At that time, the trees in our yard yielded only an ant and a spider, but we knew all sorts of animals live in trees. We made a new animal every few days. :)

Now we have an ocean on the wall. However, I have not taught my son what lives in the ocean because HE TEACHES ME. This kid is obsessed with ocean animals, and we already had a full supply of paper ocean animals to fill up our ocean. (And some of them are not on the board because he likes to play with them.)

For a long time, it was Mama making all the animals, and my son refused to help. This was a little frustrating for me, but I didn’t pressure him to change (too much), and over time, he started to help make parts of the animals (like the teeth of the saw shark above), and now he will even make the animals by himself! Hooray! Sometimes he gets busy making animals while I’m busy doing something else. Double Hooray!!

I really think having an activity room helps encourage him to create and learn on his own.

This is the first animal he made: a whipnose. They are fish that live in the very deep parts of the ocean and have fishing-pole-like noses.