In the current trend of homeschooling, it seems I’m meeting more and more people who are planning on homeschooling just through preschool and kindergarten. They take their little preschoolers to the park, and to gymnastics classes and then say that their homeschooling. In fact, I would go so far as to say that homeschooling your preschooler is in vogue. But really, as the child grows older, some of these parents have no intention of continuing homeschooling.
I have to be honest and say that it kind of makes me giggle. I’ve talked to two moms just this week who felt that to school beyond your basic ABC’s and 123’s you need training. Apparently, I’m smart enough to do this until my child turns 6. In any case, I always stick out like a sore thumb when these conversations come up because we don’t do preschool. We barely do kindergarten. I feel like such a rebel.
I won’t go into the all of the research that talks about how delaying academics is better for children. That they learn things later, but more quickly. I won’t talk about that research (which is one key philosophical reason as to why we don’t really do preschool) except to say that when you plan on homeschooling your child all the way through school, ’preparing’ them for kindergarten becomes a moot point. When your perspective is for a whole 12 years of education, some of the finer details of ’finishing this curriculum this year’ become non-essential. I’m striving towards an overarching goal. . .and so it really doesn’t matter if my 4yo knows all her letters right now at this point. By the way, even though we do ’nothing’, she does in fact, know all of her letters.
What I will talk about is what all this ’nothingness’ really entails. Firstly, it involves the off button on the television. It is amazing how that little off button sparks a child’s imagination. While my preschoolers were doing nothing the other day, I happened to go back and check on them. They had created, the three of them, a miniature city with the use of all of our blankets and sheets. They were working together and using their imagination–while doing nothing.
My four year old can also frequently be found flopped on our giant bean bag while she’s doing nothing. She’s flopped next to her older brother and sister, while we read literature aloud together. She probably doesn’t pick anything up. . .although there was that one time when she asked about whether or not the buildings in Rome were pretty before they were ruins. But probably everyone’s four year old asks that.
While doing nothing, my four year old has picked up a fair amount of Spanish. She speaks well enough in fact to get her way on the play ground or to charm the socks off of old grandmotherly types who think it’s just adorable when she says Hola!
In fact, I’m amazed at what the girls pick up while doing nothing. Our days are so filled with nothingness–I don’t know how I’d fit anything else in. Perhaps nothing is fairly intellectually stimulating? In any case, I do nothing with my preschoolers and I’m still proud of it.