7 essential tips for homeschooling kids 5 and under

“Every youth should know something of the flowers of the field, the birds of the air, the stars in their courses.” —Charlotte Mason

There is no greater period of brain growth than the first five years of life. If you’ve decided to educate at home, you may be wondering how to support your children during this magical age. What subjects do you need to teach? How quickly should you pace lessons? Which metrics do you need to hit?

Children are born persons with the capacity for both good or bad, and Charlotte Mason believed it’s up to the parents to help them with the necessary habits to be the best version of themselves.

Don’t recreate public school at home

You may be tempted to follow along with your state’s public school standards, but first, ask yourself this question: If you’ve have unplugged from the system, why would you use the system's guidelines? That’s just recreating public school at home.

Early childhood education has become a race to see how fast a child can learn to read, write essays, and do complicated math problems, often pushing them into tasks that they’re not yet developmentally ready for.

In the last five years of educating at home, I’ve found that learning happens in a much more natural way if children are given the framework for that to happen. With my littlest two children, I haven’t given any formal lessons on things like colors or shapes, and they both knew all of them somewhere between the ages of two and three.

So what do we do, then, exactly? Here it is in a nutshell: We play. We read. We go outside. I use what is around us with minimal supplementation to help my children develop a good foundation for later learning.

Teach reading with low effort, high impact

For reading, I start with the alphabet song and simple flashcards. The set we have probably came from the Dollar Tree many years ago. I show them to my kids and say the letter name. They repeat it. We make games out of it. Then we try to spot letters in the wild.

We recently went to Hobby Lobby, and upon arrival, Stone, my 5-year-old, said “Look, Mom, it’s a whole bunch of B's.” Betsy, my 3-year-old, chimed in, “Yep, that’s B for Betsy.”

I asked Stone if he saw anything else he recognized, and he did. He knew H because that’s the first letter of his older brother’s first name, something he has picked up from watching my lessons with him.

These are low-effort, high-impact ways of working toward mastery of letters before beginning mastery of sounds and words. For those ready to learn to read, I highly recommend taking an Orton-Gillingham approach to reading, such as "All About Reading" or "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons."

Teach math by starting without workbooks

Math is even easier. Learning to count and basic foundations for later math don't require textbooks or workbooks for the earliest years.

• Does your kid have a mountain of stuffed animals? Use them for counting lessons.
• Do you cook at home? Get your kids in the kitchen with you.
• Does your family spend a lot of time outside? Count rocks, sticks, and frogs.

If you find the idea of depending on your own math skills intimidating, I have found the book "Preschool Math at Home"by Kate Snow very helpful for organizing my own thoughts on how to introduce math concepts. The manual is strictly for the parent and gives suggestions of activities that introduce core math ideas in a systematic way. It’s the precursor to the aptly named series "Math with Confidence" — something I desperately need when it comes to teaching anything math-related. If you’re naturally good at math, you may be able to give your children a good foundation on your own.

Wait on writing

Writing is something that will come in time and does not have to be mastered right away, in my opinion. Children’s hands are not capable of holding a pencil correctly, or for very long, until they are older; some experts say as late as 7 years old.

In the meantime, do things that will develop their hand muscles:

• Play with playdough.
• Paint and color using larger brushes and crayons.
• Place beads onto a string.

Anything that works on fine motor skills will be beneficial when your child is finally ready to use a pencil.

Spend time outdoors

Beyond this, since we use the Charlotte Mason approach to learning, I would suggest spending as much time outside as possible. It’s remarkable the powers of observation children will develop when they are connected to nature. My kids regularly go outside and come back with tales of “Mom! Guess what I saw!” We have had in-depth conversations about an ant. They’ve tried to convince me to take in a box turtle. For this year, we’ve adopted a particular tree in our yard, and we are going to catalog its changes through the seasons.

Train habits

Children are born persons with the capacity for both good or bad, and Charlotte Mason believed it’s up to the parents to help them with the necessary habits to be the best version of themselves.

Habit training usually takes the form of identifying a habit that needs addressing and taking concrete steps to steep your child in that habit so that it becomes second nature. Many Charlotte Mason educators say that the first three habits to address are:

• Attention
• Obedience
• Truthfulness

These can all be addressed while in play. The game Simon Says is a fan favorite over here, and it teaches attention and obedience. For truthfulness, play games that require exact facts and retelling, like Telephone.

Read living books

The last recommendation I have is to spend time with quality “living books.” If you’re unsure where to start, my kids love the Beatrix Potter books. The middle child is currently on a steady diet of "The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin" at least once a day. You also cannot go wrong with the original Winnie-the-Pooh stories by A.A. Milne or anything written by Paul Galdone, Barbara Cooney, or Robert McCloskey. "Frog and Toad" may be a show on Apple TV now, but my kids still think the books are superior.

If you need more for all age groups, you can’t go wrong with John Senior’s “1,000 Good Books.”

If you’re interested in learning more about nature study, habit training, and the Charlotte Mason way, I suggest reading Charlotte Mason’s "A Philosophy of Education," or you can find an adapted and more modern version in "A Thinking Love: Studies from Charlotte Mason’s Home Education" by Karen Glass. In the meantime, be encouraged that you are capable of teaching your own children. No one in the world knows them or loves them better than you, and that is enough.