How to Easily Develop a Plan for Your Homeschool Preschool

When you’re teaching preschool at home, it’s good to plan your year. Inside this post, you’ll learn how to plan your preschool year at home.

Are you homeschooling a preschooler this year? With so many choices of what to teach, it can be overwhelming.

Planning your preschool year at home will help you stay focused. In this post, I’ll share how you can plan a homeschool preschool year that both you and your preschooler will love.

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Having a plan when you’re homeschooling preschool helps you stay focused and ensures that you’ll teach the skills you need to this year. Planning your preschool year in advance means you won’t wake up each morning scrambling to figure out what you’re going to do with your preschooler that day! Or worse, forget to get supplies when you do have an idea for an activity.

Continue reading to learn how to plan a homeschool year for your preschooler that you’ll both enjoy.

Preschool at Home Series

This is the final post in a series of articles on teaching your preschooler at home. If you missed the first four, you can find links below. Also, be sure to read to the end of this post so that you can grab my Preschool at Home Quick Start Guide that is a free gift for my email subscribers. It’ll help you plan the perfect homeschool year!

• Begin Teaching Preschool at Home in 5 Easy Ways
• How to Teach Preschool Skills Your Child Needs to Know
• 11 Really Helpful Supplies for Teaching Preschool at Home
• How to Create a Relaxed Routine for Teaching Preschool at Home
• Easily Develop a Plan for Your Homeschool Preschool Year (this post)

How to Plan Your Homeschool Preschool Year

When I do my homeschool planning, I find it easier to start by looking at the whole year and then working my way down to each week.

First, think about what skills you’d like your preschooler to learn. Consider themes they might enjoy. Decide if you’d like to come up with all of your lessons on your own or if a premade curriculum might be more helpful.

Once you’ve decided what you’d like to cover for the year, then break that down into what you’d like to cover each month. Consider holidays you want to talk about or celebrate or any themes you’d like to use.

If you’re using a premade curriculum, then consider if there’s anything you’d like to add or use as a supplement for each month. For example, you may wish to include seasonal activities once a week in addition to the lessons given for the curriculum. Planning this in advance will save you time later on.

How to Create Monthly Preschool Themes

If you are planning on using themes, then first decide how many themes you’d like to do each month. You could do this in a variety of ways. You may choose one broad theme per month and spend the entire month reading books and doing activities just on that theme. Alternatively, you may choose instead to spend a couple of weeks on one theme, or possibly one theme per week.

Personally, I think it’s best to plan more than one theme in a month. Every two weeks is my favorite time span, as long as I have enough books and activity ideas. I feel that every week is a bit short. Plus I’d constantly be pulling books, printing activity pages, and changing out my Montessori-style shelving for skills practice. Once a month feels too long. My kids tend to get bored with the same thing for too long, but that could just be us because we deal with some ADHD over here.

All that to say that’s why I prefer every two weeks. It’s long enough that I don’t feel like we have to rush through the materials and I only have to change things out twice a month. But not so long that we have a chance to get bored with the topic.

What Preschool Themes Should You Choose?

So what themes should you choose for your preschooler? In my preschool quick start guide, I offer forty themes that are perfect for preschool from which to choose.

Think about your preschooler’s interests. My son loves helping me in the garden, so one of our first preschool themes will be gardening. I have books about seeds, vegetables, and other plants that we can read. This theme is great for late summer, like July or August, because we can take the learning outside and include activities in our garden itself. So think about what your child enjoys and decide what time of the year it would work best.

How to Find Books and Activities to Teach Preschool Skills

After you’ve planned your themes for each month, then you can plan books and activities that work with those themes. Now you don’t have to go out and buy every book you’ll use brand new. Instead, try thrift stores, both locally or online, head to the library, or swap books with a friend who also has a preschooler. You may also want to just jot down titles that you may like to use and buy them a little at a time.

When thinking of ideas for activities, consider the skills you’d like your preschooler to learn. Try to fit activities to those skills. These might include activities that include working with the alphabet or learning numbers. You might want to include sensory bins or playdough trays that match your current theme. I like to put activities that work on developing skills like transferring, scooping, or pouring in small trays on shelves. Try a variety of activities that work on different skills for more interest.

Using Curriculum to Help You Teach Preschool at Home

Another place for ideas on books and activities is to look through preschool curriculum. We’ve enjoyed Sonlight’s preschool curriculum. Additionally, I like to get ideas for books that match themes in the Before Five in a Row curriculum. It’s not very expensive and includes a huge variety of activities that go along with each book. My preschooler has enjoyed the books used in both of these curricula.

My older kids use All About Spelling and I’ve found lots of fun, free resources for preschoolers on the All About Learning website. So while you may not be ready for the curriculum just yet, you can start with the preschool resources they offer. I especially love their alphabet playdough mats.

Another great curriculum for book ideas is Exploring Nature with Children. This inexpensive curriculum has weekly nature study topics that includes book choices for each topic. It also includes fun activities to do each week as well. It’s designed for whole families to use, so it’s great for nature study if you homeschool multiple ages.

Don’t forget the arts when you are homeschooling preschool. I enjoy music and art but have never been confident knowing how to create fun lessons for these subjects. So I’m thrilled to have found some fun programs that include online classes for preschool. Clap for Classics! is a great music class that offers a wide variety of courses, plus an option for live weekly Zoom classes. My preschooler especially loves those. You can read a recent review in this post.

In addition to music, I’ve also found fun chalk pastel video art classes that my preschooler adores. Chalk pastels are a fun art medium for kids that is very forgiving for preschoolers. It’s extremely easy as well, all you need for supplies are chalk pastels, copy paper, and baby wipes or wet paper towels for cleanup. And because we are Clubhouse members for the You Are an Artist video lessons, we can choose from all of the available lessons. So this includes all of the lessons that my older kids enjoy as well. It’s a great program that I can use for all of my kids, which also makes it a great value.

Tips when Planning Your Homeschool Preschool Year

• Be flexible! This is my biggest tip when homeschooling any age, but especially preschool. Leave plenty of room in your day for unexpected things that come up or just for lots of unstructured play.
• You can change your plans if your child isn’t enjoying a theme. You can also extend a theme if your preschooler shows a lot of interest in one.
• Make sure you include lots of hands-on learning activities and fun read alouds. Preschoolers don’t need to do a lot of worksheets.
• Vary the activities you plan for your child. Variety will keep your preschooler from getting bored if the activities become too redundant.
• Remember that preschoolers don’t need much time for lessons. Planning for three days per week for about 20-30 minutes each day is plenty of time for preschool. Unstructured play should fill a lot of the rest of the day.
• Enjoy the preschool years! Try to keep the activities fun and something that you both have fun doing together.

To help you get started teaching preschool at home, I’ve created a Preschool at Home quick start guide. This guide includes over forty ideas for preschool themes, as well as planning pages to plan your activities and books by week and month. It’s a perfect way to get ready to preschool at home.

The preschool years are a time for fun, hands-on learning and engaging read alouds. When you plan your homeschool preschool year, make sure that you and your preschooler enjoy it. Choose themes that interest your child for book and activity ideas. Above all, be flexible and follow your child’s lead when it comes to your preschool day.