The Ins and Outs of Home-Preschooling Your Child

By Corrie Pelc

The homeschooling movement has been growing in leaps and bounds. According to the National Home Education Network, there is an estimated 1.5 million to 2 million homeschoolers across the U.S., representing 3 to 4 percent of the school-aged population. And for some parents, homeschooling is now starting even before a child is of elementary school age through home-preschooling.

“I think it’s just a natural extension of taking care of your own children,” explains Diane Flynn Keith, editor of the online homeschooling journal Homefires.com, author of Carschooling: Over 350 Entertaining Games & Activities to Turn Travel Time into Learning Time and veteran homeschooling parent of 13 years.

“Little kids are just born with a raging desire to learn, so they ask you lots of questions and they try to model whatever you’re doing,” Keith says. “So if you just understand that all of those things are teachable moments and cover more than you could ever possibly cover in a preschool situation, then it doesn’t make sense to me why people would send their kids to preschool.”

For San Jose resident Traci Tokhi – who home-preschooled her eldest child who is now a kindergartener and is currently home-preschooling two other children – it was that ability to be the one to continue to teach her children that made her decide to homeschool.

“As parents we are our child’s first teacher in the sense that they really need us to be involved in that aspect of their lives. I really wanted to keep that kind of feel in my home of this is a learning environment and learning isn’t just something we do when I send you to this place and there’s a teacher there that’s going to teach you,” she says. “I wanted to keep learning as a organic, fluid process that began in utero and continues for a lifetime.”

And for Cathy Bonwick of Los Altos, the decision to home-preschool her oldest son, who is now eight, came from wanting to allow him to do what he wanted to do when it came to learning after spending some time in a homeschool preschool co-op. “In our preschool co-op I didn’t see him really interested in some of the preschool activities, like circle time and organized-type activities,” she says. “He more wanted to free play and that kind of thing, so I didn’t think that sending him to a formal preschool was something that would really be a good use of his time.”

Becoming the Teacher

So how do parents who want to teach their preschoolers at home find out what they should be learning at that age? Linda Dobson, author of Homeschooling the Early Years and The Ultimate book of Homeschooling Ideas – who also homeschooled her three children who are now grown – says there are plenty of curricula and Web sites that parents can visit to get an idea of what their child should be learning at the preschool level.