The Deliberate Owl

Thinking about homeschooling? Already started, but feeling overwhelmed? Maybe you're wondering: How do I start? What curriculum should I use? Does homeschooling always require top notch organization and planning skills? How much do I have to schedule in?

Here's the good news: When your kids are young, homeschooling can actually be really easy and incredibly fun. I'm talking ages 0 through 7, ish, depending on your individual kids, your style and temperament, and your level of comfort with letting conventional schooling not be your guide to how education ought to work.

I was homeschooled from kindergarten on and I'm homeschooling my own kids. My oldest is almost eight. Here are seven principles for Homeschooling in the Early Years!

1. Protect playtime—don't dive into academics too early

The job of young children is to play! Playing is how they learn!

(Watch my TEDx talk: Kids Can't Be Taught But They Love to Learn and read about the process of preparing it!)

Reserve more time for playing than you might initially be inclined to reserve. If you attended a conventional public or private school, preschool, or daycare, or if you're pulling your kids out to start homeschooling, you may be thinking you need a lot of structure, activities, curricula, and maybe even some worksheets. You don't. Not initially!

Independent free play time is where children learn. They use play to internalize information, to assimilate ideas, to try out concepts, to work through new information, to integrate everything they're encountering in the world into their existing mental models, and to generally better understand the world. For young kids, playing is learning.

Spend some time quietly eavesdropping on your kids at play. You might catch them incorporating aspects of daily life, books you've read, and things you've talked about into their play. For example, when we were reading aloud Lord of the Rings last winter, I would find my kids fighting orcs, escaping black riders, battling giant spiders in dark tunnels, feeling earthquakes as the tower of Barad-dur collapsed… They integrated the story into their play. After a day at a farm apple picking, their teddy bears live in an orchard. After we went camping as a family, the kids packed up their toys and set off for a camping trip in the backyard. And so on.

Finland doesn't require kids to start formal schooling until age 7—including formally learning to read!

But what about academics? Reading? Math? We learned basic math through board games. We read a lot, talked about letters, and played the Duolingo reading app for phonics practice. You don't need to do much formal stuff at these ages, unless your kid happens to enjoy it. Some kids do! Some kids don't! I know families who keep a couple books of letter tracing, simple math problems, and that sort of early work around because their kids genuinely enjoy them. But don't expect or force your child to enjoy them, because not all children do. If you do want to do some formal stuff, try to keep it in bite-size chunks and give plenty of movement and playtime before and after. Follow your child's lead. When they're ready, do it. If they don't seem ready, don't do it yet. Children aren't developmentally identical.

Children grow up fast. Enjoy the playtime years.

Curious about what else we've done for learning? Read about our school years:

2. Read to learn

One of the best ways to give children fodder for play is to read. Read picture books, read short fiction aloud, read non-fiction, page through encyclopedias about nature or trucks or whatever your kid likes, read about history, read biographies, and more. We always read in the evening, and we read other times too, depending on the day and what else is going on.

Reading books covers many academics: social studies, literature, history, etc. You can easily incorporate geography: we keep a globe by the couch where we do most of our reading. Whenever a book mentions a place, we find it on the globe.

Then, if you feel like it, you come up with extra stuff based on the topics in the books: relevant art or craft projects, a field trip to a museum, or even look up stuff online (videos, virtual museum tours, and so on). Or just read the books. It's up to you—play to your strengths! It's okay to emphasize the stuff that interests you. I personally like arts and crafts, so we often do that sort of thing.

Right now, for instance, with my 7-year-old, I'm reading a book about art history. Every time we learn about a new art technique (mosaic, carving stone, pottery, etc), he lights up: "I think it would be fun to learn to carve stone!" I'm not sure yet how we'll manage to learn every different technique (we probably won't), but it is so fun to see him inspired by what we've been reading. For every chapter, the book has a couple pictures of relevant art. We look up each artist mentioned, browse more work they've done, and view more art of that style. A lot of museums and archeological sites have good online portals for viewing the great works! Sometimes, we'll follow up with an art project of our own.

This summer, I learned that there is a million-year-old limestone cave about a 2-hour drive from us. It's not a huge cave, but even 2000 feet of cave is big when you've never seen one before! I checked out a bunch of books from the library about caves and rocks, we read them all, then we went and toured the cave. We have plans now to print out photos we took of the cave and the kids in the cave, write down our story about our adventure, and assemble it into a little book.

Reading can work well as a "break" activity; my kids will just about always sit for a book and take a rest from other activities.

3. Teach values and character

When children are young, it's a great time to fill them with good values. You can explicitly talk about virtues and values, and you can read stories with characters who exemplify the virtues you value. Here are a couple of the books we have been enjoying lately. The books about knights are especially popular with my sons:

• The Children's Book of Virtues edited by William J. Bennett
• The Children's Book of Home and Family edited by William J. Bennett
• Young Lancelot by San Souci
• Young Arthur by San Souci
• In the Time of Knights by Shelley Tanaka and Greg Ruhl
• King Arthur: The Sword in the Stone by Hudson Talbott
• King Aruther and the Round Table by Hudson Talbott
• Saint George and the Dragon by Margaret Hodges
• The Crystal Mountain by Ruth Sanderson
• The Squire and the Scroll by Jennie Bishop

(I found many of these books recommended in the parenting book Knights in Training by Heather Haupt.)

Now is also the time to develop good habits: daily hygiene, helping around the house and yard, learning what foods are energizing and nutritious, developing independence and responsibility. Hunt, Gather, Parent by Michaeleen Doucleff had useful advice on some of this (read my review).

4. Don't be too busy

Sometimes I see families with activities scheduled every day of the week—sometimes, multiple activities a day. Plus typical life errands, grocery shopping, etc? They're out of the house on the move every single day! Who can keep up?

Give yourself space to live life. As Michaeleen Doucleff wrote in Hunt, Gather, Parent (read my review), you don't need to entertain your kids all day. They are capable of finding things to occupy them. Boredom is good. Kim Payne, author of Simplicity Parenting (read my review, advocates for a quieter approach to life, too.

Kids need space to process their experiences, wind down, play, recoup, reset. Don't you? After a busy out-of-the-house social day, I like to schedule a quieter day. If we're going to have a busy afternoon and evening, I like us to have a slower morning. Find a balance that works for you.

5. Add rhythms to daily life

Scheduling is assigning times and durations to activities. Rhythms are general patterns and habits we follow. If you're a scheduler, schedule away! My mom was a scheduler when homeschooling my sisters and I. She had binders with lesson lists and weekly assignments; we started school at 8am every weekday, and always started with math. I'm less of a scheduler, but I do like rhythms: daily, weekly, and seasonal rhythms.

Some people like rhythms for their school day, starting with morning baskets or a beautiful thing a day. Some families institute daily quiet time, often midday, often when a younger sibling is napping. If the older kids get in the habit of having quiet time, you get daily quiet time! Some families have habits like a 10 minute tidy or 4 o'clock tidy to keep the house from becoming a disaster zone.

Weekly, I like having some activities that are consistently on certain days of the week. For instance, our forest school group meets every Friday. Mass is on Sundays. That way, as the kids learn to read a calendar, they come to know what to expect from any given week.

Seasonally, we like to do more outside activities in the warmer weather, and more indoor stuff, crafts, and reading aloud in the cooler weather. That isn't to say that we don't do crafts in summer or don't go outside in the winter, but by November, the days of spending every waking hour in the grass or mud are gone. We have other seasonal activities: the kids know we go blueberry picking in July and apple picking and fall. Beach days in summer, sledding in the winter.

Find rhythms that work for you and your family. Recognize that rhythms will change with stages of life, too.

6. Find community

You can't homeschool alone. Your kids need friends and you need friends. How you set that up can vary widely. Some families bounce around between different coops, groups, and activities every year. Some stick with the same things for years on end. Some choose to do more academic activities together in more formal co-ops and groups, leaning on each others' strengths to teach or lead different subjects. Some like their regular playgroups and do more academic work at home by themselves.

As a kid, I remember doing all sorts of things. Friday park days, Wednesday history group and art group, a theater group, and others. We did a lot of activities consistently with the same kids from an early age on up, through high school years.

I'm trying to be consistent with my kids, too. We have been in our forest school group for over four years now. We are on our third year of a Sudbury-style co-op at a farm. We see the same families from these groups and our wider church community at events, weekend BBQs, parties, park days, and playdates. And so on. We may add more regular "academic" activities or groups as time goes on, too.

Where do you find community? In my area, most homeschool activities are coordinated through Facebook groups. There are groups for different co-ops, playgroups, meetups around different interests, curriculum swaps, and more. How do people in your area coordinate? Look for groups online—maybe they're on Facebook, maybe some other social platform. Go to the park during the day when school is in and talk to whoever you see there—chances are, they're homeschoolers. Ask any homeschoolers you meet about the other activities they do and how they found out about those activities. This can clue you in to what's common in your area.

7. You don't have to do the same thing every year

Every year is a new year. You can reevaluate. You can add or subtract activities. You can switch curriculum or ditch curriculum or try curriculum. You can try a new co-op or quit a group. Iterate to improve..

Sure, sometimes you feel you have to commit because you have to pay for the subscription or sign up for the year or buy the whole curriculum. But even then, if whatever you're doing isn't working, remember the sunk costs fallacy and move on.

Make yourself happy, too. Play to your strengths. Don't stress so much about what you're not doing. If you're not a crafter, don't do crafts. (Or find a co-op or group where someone else leads them!) Homeschooling won't look the same for everyone—and that's the beauty of it!

So what activities count as homeschooling?

Here are some ideas for activities you can do that are homeschooling:

• Free play
• Pretend play
• Playing outside
• Board games
• Reading books
• Audiobooks
• Podcasts
• Videos about how things work (factories, chainsaws, horseback riding, whatever!)
• Library visits
• Grocery stores
• Helping around the house (home ec? Life skills?)
• Cooking with you
• Art projects of all kinds: drawing, coloring, painting, finger painting, play dough (basic sculpture!), outside chalk drawing, cutting and gluing paper crafts, etc
• Outings: zoos, parks, vacations, museums, art shows, music in the park, hiking, beaches, etc

A lot of these may not sound like typical school activities. But when children are young, they need playtime and experiences more than they need to sit still and listen. Playing is how children learn.

Need ideas for your own homeschooling?

Read these book reviews and education posts:

• Book Review: Homeschooling with Gentleness by Suzie Andres
• How to Afford Homeschooling and Other Alternative Education on a Budget
• How to Involve Kids in Modern Work
• Schools Zap Kids' Motivation and Mental Health
• Why Watching My Parents Cook Means I Can't Share Soup Recipes—And How I'm Encouraging My Kids to Cook Too
• How to Consciously Be A Role Model in Creativity, Curiosity, and Crafting for Children
• Why Outdoor Time is Important for Kids
• Book Review: The Little Way of Homeschooling by Suzie Andres
• Book Review: Teaching from Rest: A Homeschooler's Guide to Unshakeable Peace by Sarah Mackenzie
• Five Board Games We Play With Our 6-Year-Old for Learning Math
• Book Review: Simplicity Parenting by John Payne and Lisa Ross
• How to Harness Patience, Expectations, Flexibility, and Relationship to Make Parenting Smoother and Less Stressful