Pre-school homeschool resources

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Allegra

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I’m in a support group for parents of kids with anal-rectal malformations. Due to the nature of the malformation, many parents feel it’s best to keep their kids out of school for as long as possible, because they are often incontinent and they often have to wait until they are older until they are ready to manage themselves in a school setting. Also, many kids require multiple surgical procedures and hospitalizations a year for the first years in their life, which often delays the start of school. Many of these parents had no intention of “home-schooling” and don’t really feel prepared to do so. Several of them have reported that they found out that their kids were “behind” when they started school in kindergarten or first grade. They were wondering if there was some sort of resource that is easy for parents to use to guide them in “home pre-school”. I figured there were enough homeschooling parents in this forum that there ought to be some good recommendations. I think what most of the parents were looking for was some sort of guide that showed them what skills kids were supposed to have prior to 1st grade and gave some ideas of how to teach them. Or maybe even an organization where they could have their child’s “readiness” evaluated? Video games are appreciated too, since a lot of these kids spend a lot of time having enemas done and tablets are a good distraction.
 
What kind of education theory are you trying to achieve?

If the sole goal of this is classroom prep then parents should be encouraged to look at traditional curriculum like Seton or Sunrise.

If it’s more relaxed so medical issues can be focused on Montessori and Charlotte mason and five in a row is good

If the just wanted to make sure they did the bare minimum and otherwise up school then simply asking for your districts kindergarten readiness standards. It will really vary widely. Their are kindergarten must haves but many times what teachers expect is fed by what they typically see…and that varies from school to school.
 
Do those programs have a pre-school and/or kindergarten curriculum? I don’t know if every district or school publishes “readiness standards”. I know the district I work at doesn’t. The only standards are having achieved the age of five years by the 31st of July and having received all the required vaccinations. I did recommend that “Parents as Teachers” program, though admittedly, I don’t know much about it. The conversation was started by a mom who is really frustrated because her daughter is having such a hard time adjusting to school and is being retained in kindergarten.
 
Yes. Seton and Sonlight (sorry I was wrong on that one) do.

https://www.sonlight.com/ Sonlight has both Pre-k and Pre-kindergarten.
http://www.setonhome.org/ Seton has traditional Pre-k.

Here’s an online kindergarten readiness list:


Your district should have a list, even if it’s not published.

On this the last two are what children often most struggle with. And it’s not something you can easily teach. Many times teachers blame parents if the child did not go to pre–school. And quite frankly the teacher blaming the parent is complete and utter horse pucky. Kids in pre-school have had an advantage in the social aspects but MANY still struggle with the emotional side of all day structured learning. It may be good if that parent asks for a different teacher. A good teacher is not going to blame a parent for having their child be unprepared for K unless that child literally sat and watched Ren and Stempy all day. I doubt this is the case.

The other thing is with a physical disability sometimes learning disabilities are missed. At this age rather than do a full assessment teachers will just say the child “isn’t adjusting” or “needs more time” or is “emotionally immature”. In the PK-8 Catholic school, the principal told me that every child who had repeated a grade (besides PK) was diagnosed with some sort of learning disability by high school. Granted this is a school of about 200 children but it’s cautionary enough to raise eyebrows. Years ago, they wouldn’t even bother to test children for disabilities until second grade. Today, if a child does not appear to be meeting standards they request that a parent have the child assessed before the school year begins.

As a note, the mother should begin to discuss what this can mean for her child in the long run. Our state’s adoption of NCLB (No Child Left Behind) meant they could only repeat twice from K-3. My friend’s daughter repeated K “just because she was too emotional” and then needed to repeat 1st for academics. She failed 3rd grade because she had hit a “you can’t make me do this” streak…but because of the law she HAD to be promoted to 4th grade. She hadn’t done a lick of work since 2nd…so you can imagine how well that worked.

And again, homeschooling is a huge “playground” with many features. If brick’n’morter school is your goal, it’s probably best to stick with a curriculum so a child is accustomed to more book learning rather than exploration.
 
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Are these Catholic programs? I can recommend them, but this support group has people from all walks of life in it and won’t necessarily be interested in a program that is overtly religious. I personally favor the “exploration” method for early childhood education and I’m not a fan of pre-schools in general, but many of these parents are overwhelmed and are just looking for some sort of resource that can help them determine where their kid is on their development. IA is a malformation that effects every demographic and so there’s everything from wealthy surgeons to single moms on minimum wage. I’d wager that most of them had never dreamed in a million years that they’d be considering a home school program. Some of them live in cities with parks, zoos, museums, etc, but others live in rural areas where even a public library is difficult to get to on a regular basis.
 
Allegra said:
Are these Catholic programs? I can recommend them, but this support group has people from all walks of life in it and won’t necessarily be interested in a program that is overtly religious. I personally favor the “exploration” method for early childhood education and I’m not a fan of pre-schools in general, but many of these parents are overwhelmed and are just looking for some sort of resource that can help them determine where their kid is on their development. IA is a malformation that effects every demographic and so there’s everything from wealthy surgeons to single moms on minimum wage. I’d wager that most of them had never dreamed in a million years that they’d be considering a home school program. Some of them live in cities with parks, zoos, museums, etc, but others live in rural areas where even a public library is difficult to get to on a regular basis.
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I don’t doubt all walks of life face issues. IA is no different than many physical and medical disparities that children can face that have some sort of isolating factor. And as far as “considering homeschool” the all walks of life is not really unusual. You might check out your local homeschool facebook group for younger kids. My area has a pre-k and early elementary group

Seton is Catholic, Sonlight is Christian the other well respected one in it’s field is Timberdoodle (they do have a secular program) as well as Time for Learning. (although Time4Learning is on the computer)

If they want a truly secular full experience with books, Timberdoodle will likely best fit the bill. However, it is also the most expensive by far, where the others run about $200-$300 it runs just over $500.

Independent learning centers are going to be a good bet for an assessor. Depending on location an assessment is going to run $50-$200.

And if we were talking about classroom readiness, what parents have to understand is that the best curriculum isn’t going to necessarily make much of a difference in classroom readiness. Parents often don’t understand just how they compensate for their kids when self-administering even the best most rigorous curriculum. Something as simple as the way you present scissors or a pencil can impact grip for positive or negative. Long story short…no homeschool curriculum is going to prepare a child for a classroom. They are two often disparate forms of education. The best thing a parent can do is seek those social and other situations with similar-aged children and run by professionals or in the very least educated voulenteers.
 
I knew a kid who was maybe 13-14, who was homeschooling for that very reason. So be careful about just thinking of things with a focus on “pre-k” homeschooling; think about things as covering “pre-k through 8th grade” if that’s how things work out, but be able to transfer into a classroom earlier if medical issues allow.

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution for homeschooling. Different people are going to want to have different emphases, and that’s cool, because kids aren’t cookie cutters, and parents aren’t cookie cutters, and parents don’t have cookie cutter expectations of what an educated/well-rounded individual is supposed to know. And once they have an opinion about what an educated/well-rounded individual is supposed to know, they have varying opinions on how to get there.

So-- for me, I really enjoyed reading the Well-Trained Mind book, because I like the way the learning theory is structured (emphasis on language, art, music, history, literature; you go over things like history and great literature at three different points at differing, developmentally-appropriate levels, etc) . There’s a discussion forum that’s useful for other people who have similar priorities, where I get to read about what resources they did and didn’t like, and make a guess as to whether it’s worth trying for us.

Likewise, while I disagree with Charlotte Mason on her ideas about, say, early reading, I really enjoy her emphasis on things like nature study and habit. So you can pick and choose-- leave behind what doesn’t fit with your ideas (like waiting until age 7 to start reading, or focus on whole-word memorization rather than phonics) but implement what you agree with.
 
For example, math is something to develop an opinion about. There are two ways to teach math: a mastery method, or a spiral method. For me, I chose using Math-U-See, because I thought mastery was important. You learn how to add single digits, until you get really good at adding single digits, and you can add any single digits when asked. Then you move on to adding double digits, until you get really good at adding double digits. Then you learn how to subtract single digits, and get good at that. Then you learn how to subtract multiple digits. Then you move on to multiplication. I liked how it was focused: you paid attention to one thing, until you could do it well, and then you could move on.

Our local school district uses the spiral method-- Saxon Math. With the spiral method, you do a little bit of everything, with the expectation that by the time you hit 6th grade, you’re able to do it all. So you do a fractions question, and a skip-counting/number pattern question, and a telling-time question, and a word problem, and so on. So it’s more interesting, because you keep jumping around into different sorts of problems… but it’s frustrating, because if your kid has trouble with “quarter-til 10 = 9:45”, only getting one or two problems of that nature isn’t going to drill it into their heads.

If you don’t have a taste for selecting your own curriculum, you might look at enrolling in an online school. Even if you do enjoy selecting your own curriculum, it’s nice to look online and read some syllabi from online schools, like Angelicum Academy, or Kolbe, or Thomas Aquinas.
 
It would be unusual for a kid with IA to need to be out of school for that long. The vast majority of IA kids have developed a bowel management plan by the time they are six or seven. Most manage it during the toddler years. It’s really the more severe cases that require a malone procedure for daily washouts that tend to see a school delay that goes past preschool. What parents are asking for are programs that teach age-appropriate math and reading skills for pre-school and kindergarten kids. I don’t really know any names or have any recommendations, so that’s why I was asking here. I figured some of the homeschool parents would be able to recommend a good program they’d tried.
 
My local facebook group isn’t going to be much help to these parents because they’re from all over the world, (mostly US and Canada, but still) but local homeschool groups have already been offered and discussed as a resource. I’ll bring up the Timberdoodle and Time4Learning programs. I think a web-based program might work great for kids who are going to be out of state for two weeks for a bowel management program. By “independent learning center” do you mean places like Braingym and Sylvan? If so, those have already been brought up, but some parents were skeptical and brought up the whole adage of “when you’re only tool’s a hammer…” I don’t get the impression that most the parents were concerned about the social aspects of the classroom. The OP definately wasn’t. She specifically mentioned that she felt blindsighted by the expectation that her 5yo would already know how to write. She thought she was doing well that she’d taught her to write her whole name out, but the teacher complained that it was all in capital letters and she didn’t know how to write anything else. In my opinion, I think the OP was either a little over-sensitive regarding the teacher’s assessment, or otherwise the teacher’s just a mean old witch. I can’t bring myself to believe that any kindy teacher would find it strange that a new student doesn’t know how to write all their letters upon arrival. But apparently, her child’s been considered behind all year because of that. So, what parents were wanting is a specific list of skills that an incoming kindy students ought to be expected to have and some guidance about and resources for how those skills could be taught at home. Stuff I recommended were the literacy backpacks our public library offer, (thought I have no idea if those are universal at all libraries or not) those “tinker kits” you always see advertised on facebook, and those books the kids can write in with a dry erase marker and work on their letters. I thought for sure some of the parents in here would have some other good ideas.
 
Allegra said:
It would be unusual for a kid with IA to need to be out of school for that long. The vast majority of IA kids have developed a bowel management plan by the time they are six or seven. Most manage it during the toddler years. It’s really the more severe cases that require a malone procedure for daily washouts that tend to see a school delay that goes past preschool. What parents are asking for are programs that teach age-appropriate math and reading skills for pre-school and kindergarten kids. I don’t really know any names or have any recommendations, so that’s why I was asking here. I figured some of the homeschool parents would be able to recommend a good program they’d tried.
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I think the issue with that is homeschoolers do not homeschool for the express purpose of ensuring their child can go to school. These days the biggest reason for homeschooling is because parents are dissatisfied with school standards. Because of that there are quite a bit more secular materials as religio starts to become a very small reason to homeschool.
 
Regardless of the reason, they can still recommend the good programs and resources they’ve used.
 
If you’re just wanting to focus on pre-K, usually they deal with things like number recognition, letter recognition, can you write your name, do you know your address and phone number, shapes, colors, can you count to 20, can you recite your alphabet, and things like that. Most of that stuff, an involved parent is going to cover naturally on their own-- although things like “what’s my address” or “what’s my phone number” are less likely to be on a parent’s radar.

By the time you get to kindergarten on up, each state is likely to have state standards that someone graduating from (kindergarten) (first grade) (second grade) (etc) is expected to do. So, for example, since I’m in Texas, I know that Texas has TEKS (Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills). So, when I look at the breakdown by grade level, I see that my kindergarten-aged son is expected to:
(A) recognize that spoken words can be represented by print for communication;
(B) identify upper- and lower-case letters;
(C) demonstrate the one-to-one correspondence between a spoken word and a printed word in text;
(D) recognize the difference between a letter and a printed word;
(E) recognize that sentences are comprised of words separated by spaces and demonstrate the
awareness of word boundaries (e.g., through kinesthetic or tactile actions such as clapping and jumping);
(F) hold a book right side up, turn its pages correctly, and know that reading moves from top to bottom and left to right; and
(G) identify different parts of a book (e.g., front and back covers, title page)
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etc, etc, etc.

We’ve only had a Secretary of Education at the federal level since the Carter administration— education has generally been a state-by-state thing. So someone in Texas is going to have a different set of expectations on them than someone in Hawaii or Alaska or Maryland.
 
Allegra said:
My local facebook group isn’t going to be much help to these parents because they’re from all over the world, (mostly US and Canada, but still) but local homeschool groups have already been offered and discussed as a resource. …
The OP definately wasn’t. She specifically mentioned that she felt blindsighted by the expectation that her 5yo would already know how to write. She thought she was doing well that she’d taught her to write her whole name out, but the teacher complained that it was all in capital letters and she didn’t know how to write anything else. In my opinion, I think the OP was either a little over-sensitive regarding the teacher’s assessment, or otherwise the teacher’s just a mean old witch. I can’t bring myself to believe that any kindy teacher would find it strange that a new student doesn’t know how to write all their letters upon arrival. But apparently, her child’s been considered behind all year because of that. So, what parents were wanting is a specific list of skills that an incoming kindy students ought to be expected to have and some guidance about and resources for how those skills could be taught at home. Stuff I recommended were the literacy backpacks our public library offer, (thought I have no idea if those are universal at all libraries or not) those “tinker kits” you always see advertised on facebook, and those books the kids can write in with a dry erase marker and work on their letters. I thought for sure some of the parents in here would have some other good ideas.
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What kind of writing are we talking about? Cutting/writing your name/identifying letters is pretty basic. Again, the link I posted with kindergarten readiness was a good one. A 5yo who cannot identify letters is behind. Even Bubble Guppies/Paw Parol/Dora/etc all encourage letter identification. The capital letter thing is a bit annoying but not “bad”. I believe 36 letters is the standard in my area (of the 52 upper and lower)

Many libraries do have book bags but things like tinkercrate can get pricey.

Independent learning centers are far better than the branded ones. Assessment is part of what homeschoolers generally do over standardized tests.

As far as standards–perhaps the parents would be better off being taught how to find state/provence or local ones.
Allegra said:
Regardless of the reason, they can still recommend the good programs and resources they’ve used.
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I think you’re missing the point. I know of MANY good homeschool materials, but 90% of my favorites (and what my friends use) for pre-k/k…actually up until 2nd grade …would not really prepare a child for traditional schooling in the way the school would prefer. Montessori homeschool is HUGE near me and that really doesn’t mesh well with traditional classroom learning…heck many Montessori classroom students have incredible difficulty with traditional classrooms.
 
True. And that’s the hard part about it. Individual states, schools, and even teachers are likely to have different expectations.
 
Oh, I don’t believe that. We have lots of Montessori based early childhood centers in our area and their students usually come to our school in kindergarten or 2nd grade and they rarely have trouble adapting to our school. Those that do usually can attribute it to a diagnosed learning disorder or the fact that their parents just separated. Montessori just isn’t as gosh-darn special as they want to think they are. At any rate, a good resource is a good resource. If it teaches kids to read, love books, manipulate numbers, problem solve, recognize patterns, etc, that’s what I think these parents are looking for.

As far as the writing goes, I understand that the OPs child’s teacher actually expected her incoming kindergarteners to be able to correctly write all their letters. It’s hard for me to guess if that was really the expectation of the teacher (I doubt it.) or if the OP is over-reacting to her assessment of her child, or if the OP simply doesn’t understand how far behind her child actually is. I don’t know anything about the OP or her temperment. What I do know is that expecting every child to come into kindy able to write all their letters correctly and legibly is unrealistic.

I know tinkercrates are expensive, but some of the families in this group can afford stuff like that. Not all, obviously, but a some can. Do you know of cheaper alternatives or maybe some books that explain how to do similar experiments with dollar store equipment?
 
For preschool science, I enjoyed this website.

Mostly, we focused on the physical science projects. Magnets, ice melting, sponges and water, blowing bubbles, floating, etc. Most of those projects could be done with ordinary things lying around the house.
 
Now THAT is awesome! I will definitely pass that one along. (I might come back to it this summer when the weather gets too hot with my 4yo.)
 
I honestly believe a lot of math skills are retained much faster doing experiments like this than doing traditional math problem drills.
 
I wouldn’t have thought about it, but I realized when working with my first that knowing how to do a worksheet-- being able to read it, not just verbally, but separating out the information depicted on it, and knowing how to respond to it-- is a skill in and of itself.

For their pre-k year, I did the Math-U-See primer. Then I went to Alpha for kindergarten. It gave them a really solid footing for first grade. The manipulatives for Math-U-See were way better than the manipulatives used by the school system, and I highly recommend them. Being able to use them really helped make math way less abstract, especially in the early years.

Another interesting thing I found was that my first son was very spoiled by me standing over his shoulder and walking him through our work. That was a skill he had to develop when he went into the classroom-- being one of fifteen, or one of twenty, rather than having a one-on-one teacher:student experience. He had to become much more self-sufficient, which is normally a characteristic I’d associate with high school/college work, rather than a first grader.
 
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