When I worked full-time, we loved the preschool my son attended. However, when I became a stay-at-home-mom, I realized there were a lot of benefits to homeschooling my preschooler. But I didn’t really know where to start.
Thank goodness for Pinterest and all the free preschool printables they have online! Not to mention great resources for preschool activities, reasonable preschool goal setting, day-to-day schedule ideas, and managing realistic expectations.
I wanted to share some of my go-to free preschool resources from when I first started homeschooling my 4 year old. These resources are also great if you want preschool activities for your 2 year old or 3 year old.
I’m happy to say this is the second installment of my back-to-school series. I’m posting 5 Days of Preschool Prep ideas just for you! There are homeschool preschool printables, a preschool schedule, and preschool toy ideas for parents. These could work for the stay at home mom doing preschool at home during the day or any working mom wanting to augment on the weekends. Here we go!
Day 1: 8 Homeschool Benefits for Preschoolers
Day 2: 9 Free Preschool Resources for Parents
Day 3: A Sample Preschool Schedule Any Mom Can Follow
Day 4: Our favorite preschool educational toys [and how to use them]
Day 5: 19 Awesome Eco-Friendly Toys for Preschoolers
There are affiliate links in this post, this means if you click on a link then I might receive a commission at no additional cost to you.
9 Free Homeschool Resources to Prepare for Kindergarten
I used inspiration from this blog for our schedule by Katie Bennet.
It’s more geared towards Kindergarten but I adapted it for our preschool schedule. I took away a few things from that post that I’m highlighting below.
Always keep it fun
I’m a type A personality and pretty goal oriented. And I like to stay focused (which often translates to “serious”). I wouldn’t call myself the “fun parent” by any means. But the biggest take away from the above blog post I got was to maintain the mentality to keep it fun! She did that using a few aspects like the challenge question, science focus, fun art project, and cooking lessons.
Challenge Question
We use the challenge question on a white board every day at our home. I like using a whiteboard because I can move it around and change it up easily. We already had the one pictured above at home in my office (this one is about the same size on Amazon). I write a new question to either review old material my son has already covered or to practice new skills. For example, some challenge questions we’ve done are:
- What’s your last name and how do you spell it?
- What sound does the letter “m” make?
- What words rhyme with “cat”?
- What’s your sisters’ name?
- How old are you? (practicing numbers)
- What state do you live in?
As you can see, we also put our Bible Verse on the whiteboard. I pick one easy preschool Bible verse and we work on it every day during story time until the kids easily rattle it off. It normally only takes a week or less! If you’d like our list of Bible verses, you can download them here.
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Library Visits for Science
We go to story time at the library once or twice a month, and I try to pick out books we don’t have but also focus on some science topics.
Here are some top-rated electricity books on Amazon as an idea to look for in your local library:
“Project time” every day
I love to inspire the kids to do art every day. Even though it’s not my strength and it’s extra work we try to do a project, we still do it! We use the KiwiCo Koala box once a month. These projects are awesome to do something hands-on without having to buy all the supplies individually. Here’s an idea of what projects we’ve done in the past with KiwiCo. I love their STEM related projects.
We’ve also really enjoyed the free drawing videos on YouTube like the ones below. I choose the videos that are 3 – 5 minutes and pause it after each of the steps so the kids can have time to do it. Then my kids loves coloring the pictures in! We watch the videos on the iPad. Below they are drawing a shark. Yes, we had pajama day that day 🙂
Cooking
We’ve had fun cooking pies and cookies over the past few months. My son also enjoys making his own PB&J or ham and cheese sandwiches. Maybe we’ll move on to mac’n’cheese soon. Hah!
My Preschool Goals
For Setting Goals
To get ideas for our preschool goals and objectives for the year I used these printable worksheets as ideas, and then I just made my own power point document.
You can grab our goals template below. It’s super easy to download, customize to your content, or just print and go!
They aren’t as pretty as the Teachers Pay Teachers one but they work. Or you can buy them from the website for less than $2. Even though we were only working on preschool goals I picked some Kindergarten goals to work towards too. Again, I found these ideas all over Pinterest!
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Worksheets
I covered all our worksheets with page protectors (grab on Amazon) that we already had and found some wet-erase markers so we could use them over and over again. I then slipped them into an empty binder I had in my office!
Letter worksheets
I printed off all these Kindergarten number worksheets from Confessions of a Homeschooler to put in a binder. Again, I found this resource on Pinterest. I also have a Homeschool + Preschool board if you want other inspiration!
Number worksheets
I printed off these free Beginning Sounds Letter Worksheets for Early Learners from Surviving a Teacher’s Salary.
Fall Pattern worksheets for Kindergarten
We also printed off worksheets like this for working on patterns from Made By Teachers.
If you want other great ideas, hop on over to Pinterest and follow my preschool board!
https://www.pinterest.com/simplified_motherhood/homeschooling-%2B-preschool/
Let me know if these resources inspired you to try something new.
Drop a comment if you’ve tried one of these resources with your preschooler. I’d love to hear how it went!
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