Preschool at Home

I can’t say when we decided that our goal was to homeschool Delilah. It certainly wasn’t what I envisioned I was going to do before I had a child. I went to school to study early childhood education, and my original plan was to work in a preschool. When Delilah was born, I thought it would be great if she could attend preschool where I worked. I don’t remember how it came up, but we started mentioning homeschooling casually and more out of curiosity than making an actual plan. As my curiosity on the subject grew, I decided to research Oregon’s requirements for homeschooling. Once we learned that homeschooling in Oregon was actually a viable option, it came up more and more until it became what we were planning to do.

A few factors influenced our decision to homeschool, but they were not the primary reason we ultimately decided to try homeschooling. Delilah was born at the absolute beginning of Covid shutdowns. During all the shutdowns, we heard a lot about the struggles that were going on in schools, both online and firsthand, from family members who worked in education. With all the uncertainty surrounding when things would return to normal, the thought of homeschooling sounded a little more solid and quite a bit safer.

This wasn’t a huge influencing factor in our decision, but we did discuss the safety issues that come with child care. It’s hard to live in this world and not hear about the horrible things that happen in child care facilities across the country. It’s definitely scary and even more so when limited availability and high costs limit parent choice in where their child attends. When possible, these reasons make the idea of having someone at home, whether it’s a parent or other family member, seem much more appealing during the preschool years.

The biggest influence on our decision was the change in my perspective after Delilah was born. I was finishing my last semester to get my degree when I was pregnant, still planning to begin looking for work at a preschool when I was ready. As she grew and became a toddler, she was already learning so much. She was learning shapes, colors, numbers, and new words, and the more she learned, the more I loved teaching her. It might be a little selfish in a way, but I felt like I didn’t want to be away from her all day to teach other children when I could use my skills to teach her. We talked a lot about our plans for the future and what changes it would take for me to be able to stay home with her to homeschool. Once that was figured out, we were all on board with the decision to homeschool. We were also realistic with this decision, knowing how situations and educational needs can change, but we wanted to try it for as long as possible and as long as it continued to work for us.

Going into this, I was very confident in my ability to build her an awesome preschool curriculum myself. However, I realized I would need some help in the later years to ensure we stayed on par to meet the standards needed for the required testing in Oregon. I started researching different homeschool curriculums and reading a ton of reviews to find what I liked best. We started doing a bit more formal preschool (and I say this very loosely) when she was around 3. I purchased the Gentle/Classical preschool curriculum pdf and printed and laminated everything (I have a recurring habit of being overzealous when I’m excited about things). The imagery in the curriculum set was beautiful, and I loved that it included activities in each lesson set that paired with the book for that lesson. We had a lot of fun using that curriculum, which helped both of us warm up to school at home.

As much as we enjoyed the curriculum, it was not a comprehensive one we could use as she got older. They have great nature-inspired resources for other grades, but we would have to find another math and phonics curriculum after 1st grade. I wanted to find a curriculum we could continue using throughout her education. For her next year of preschool, I decided to try purchasing The Good and the Beautiful curriculum (which also has free homeschool content available to download), which could take us all the way through 7th grade with little supplementation needed.

One of the joys of homeschooling is being able to move at our own pace, take breaks when we need to, and move up when we’re ready. Delilah turned 4 back in March, and by then, she was starting to get bored with the curriculum we were using. She liked all the activities we were doing but was ready to learn more. We had planned to wait until fall to start her next year of preschool when the regular school year would start. That was part of coming to the realization that we didn’t have to do that. She was so excited and ready to learn more, so we decided to start in June.

Since starting her 2nd year of preschool, we have been doing about three weekly lessons and tons of reading and other activities. We usually start each lesson with Delilah picking a book for us to read together. The flexibility to work at her school when it best fits into our day has been amazing, whether we have appointments or other things going on. It also helps to make changes so we can both be at our best, for her to learn and for me to instruct her. It’s also been a lot of fun to take her school with us wherever we go. On nice days, we can do school outside, and some days, we go into town with Joshua when he goes to work and do our lessons in a bakery and then spend the rest of the morning exploring the library. We’re still very early on in our homeschool journey, but we’re very excited to continue learning as we go and to homeschool as long as we can.