As promised, I’m posting the first of my (what is now THREE-part) series of columns about my experience homeschooling a preschooler.  It’s been a challenge to do anything that looks like learning with a high energy one-year-old in the house, but after writing the columns, I have realized that we’ve managed to do quite a lot.  This is a good testament to keeping some kind of record or portfolio of your children’s work, if you choose to homeschool.

In the column I mentioned that I used the World Book Typical Course of Study (UPDATE: Unfortunately, World Book has removed this page from their website, but About.com put it on their website. You can access it here.) to give me peace of mind about the “academics” side of the equation, although at this age, I really do feel it’s more important for children to have free time to play and explore their worlds more than anything else.  I wrote a column about the importance of playing make-believe a while back, if you are interested.

Above you can see my son’s “Learning Box.”  He and I decorated it together, and I fill it with the things that I want us to work on when we have time.  This is a huge help because I don’t have time for any kind of “planning.”

I keep the box in our “activity room.” It’s been a big help to have a space we dedicate to activities and learning.  All the tools are very accessible to my son, and he is increasingly going in there to use them.  Much of the learning we do is done spontaneously when he gets interested in doing it!

Click here to read the column, and please sign up for my RSS Feed so that you won’t miss the upcoming columns in which I write about what we use for learning and some of our favorite activities!  These columns will definitely have more “meat” about how to homeschool a preschooler.

As always, thank you for stopping by, and please leave your own insights about homeschooling during the preschool years!

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UPDATE: To make it easier for you, I’m including my Table of Contents for Preschool here:

• The column I refer to in this post:  The Efforts of Homeschooling a Preschooler at the Barrow Journal
• Homeschooling a Preschooler, Part 2 (refers to Teaching Preschoolers at Home at the Barrow Journal) – Activities we did for homeschooling preschool
• Online Resources for Homeschooling a Preschooler, Part 3 (refers to Internet as a Teaching Tool at the Barrow Journal, but you’ll find all the links on the blog post.)
• How I taught my son his ABCs, 123s, and a little bit of my philosophy too
• Setting Our Homeschool Priorities for Two Boys, ages 5 and 2  (For follow-up posts, look under “Kindergarten.”)