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It’s been a year of homeschooling!

Well, it’s actually been 9 months of homeschooling, but New York says the school year starts July 1 and ends June 30, so it’s a new school year!

Despite what feels like a lot of homeschools fails, I feel so good about this last (this first!) school year. We had a lot of time that we took breaks from “formal” schooling, but we always went back and found something new to try to reinvigorate our classroom. Here’s a bit about what homeschooling looks like in our family.

Easy Peasy

When we started homeschooling, I soon discovered Easy Peasy All-in-One Homeschool, a free homeschool curriculum online with the option for purchasing printed materials and/or donating to the site (but neither is required to use it). Easy Peasy’s preschool curriculum pretty much includes some things that they created along with other free resources they’ve compiled from across the internet.

In the beginning, Easy Peasy was a great choice. K enjoyed each of the daily links (especially Starfall!), and we eventually would do several days worth of worksheets/activities. But eventually she decided she didn’t want to do Easy Peasy for school anymore – likely because anytime she did schoolwork, it was on her school tablet and she fell down the rabbit hole and ended up watching the links ahead of time so she didn’t want to do the work when it was assigned.

Either way, Easy Peasy gave me so many ideas for how homeschooling works and for things she should be working on and what she should know. I really appreciate their curriculum and look forward to continuing the worksheets/activities and seeing if K likes their Kindergarten curriculum.

Puzzle Apps

Another thing that has been great for our preschool is the use of puzzle apps. K LOVES jigsaw puzzles and other puzzles for spatial awareness. She started with easier puzzles, but she’s now doing 36 piece puzzles like a pro.

K also loves playing “Blocks,” an app similar to tangram, but the shapes you fit into the larger shape range from simple to complex and vary in number depending on the level. This game used to be really hard for her and she’d constantly ask mommy or daddy for help, but she rarely need help anymore… which blows my mind considering her age!

Workbooks

It’s crazy to realize just how many workbooks we’ve bought over the years in anticipation of homeschooling. I’m sure I’ll miss some, and I can link to them in the future, but here are a bunch that we have and have used this year:

• Smart Alec books from Five Below – Practice Writing, Speech & Sounds, Ready for Phonics, ABCs
• Mickey Mouse Alphabet Learning
• Sesame Street Write & Wipe – Alphabet, Numbers, Colors
• Brainquest Pre-K

Books

Aside from a ton of look & finds and books that we’ve read for bedtime reading, story time, or reading for the sake of reading, here are books that we’ve used for solid learning:

• Natural History – from DK and the Smithsonian
• Scholastic Children’s Dictionary
• Southwestern Advantage – My Book of Colors, My Book of Numbers, My Book of Shapes, My Book of Words

General Resources

Knowing that I planned to homeschool in the future, we got a variety of resources to use when the time came. They’re not specific to homeschooling, but they’ve come in handy!

• Teach My Toddler, Teach My Preschooler, Teach My Preschooler The Solar System (and Teach My Baby for O who just turned a year old last week!)
• Knowledge Crates (I don’t use it all the time, so we got crates for one year and now have activities for all 4 seasons)
• Montessori toys (a large variety including counting toys, lacing toys, and others to promote fine motor skills)
• Melissa & Doug Boards – My Daily Calendar and Responsibility Chart
• Posters with letters and numbers (came with others that I haven’t put up yet)
• The Letter People (my parents used this with me and my siblings when we were learning our letters and I was excited to get this hand-me-down to use with K too! – not a purchasing link – you can find more info there)
• Several busy books

Digital Resources & Freebies

There are a ton of homeschool bloggers out there that create free and paid resources. Although we haven’t necessarily used all of their resources yet based on K’s age, we’ve purchased or gotten free homeschooling resources from (in no particular order):

• Malia Phelps Waller
• The Wolfe Pack
• Katie J Trent
• Blessed Homeschool
• Techie Homeschool Mom
• Happy Hive Homeschooling
• Rabbit Trails Homeschool
• 10 Minute Momentum
• Inside Our Normal
• Hope in the Chaos
• How to Homeschool My Child
• Homeschool with Moxie
• Homeschooling 4 Him
• Homeschool & Humor
• Homeschool Resource Co
• Create Your Homeschool
• Hess UnAcademy
• Whole Child Homeschool

Digital Resources I’ve Created

My absolute favorite things I created during our first year of homeschooling are K’s morning binder which is filled with many of the things I’ve read that kids should know when they enter kindergarten, as well as her name project which had all of the letters of her name which we cut out and she glued in order six times (and twice a reverse order) in her preschool lap book so she could practice spelling her name and some fine motor skills. I also created two upper and lowercase alphabet matching projects which are also in her lap book. I’ve been making a student planner and I’m really excited to finish it up and release it soon!

Projects

We did a lot of fun projects this year. I especially enjoyed our countdown to Halloween paper chain (I’m not a fan, but K loves Halloween), our paper gratitude tree and advent wreath, our snowman (Olaf) made from boxes covered in paper, our fireworks mural, coloring rice, our bird house, and our paper towel and toilet paper roll STEAM project!

Adventures & Field Trips

Along with many regular trips for errands which included spotting letters as we drove and in the stores, we visited a flower farm, we visited two libraries a few times, attended baptisms at two very different churches, took a road trip to Florida and a cruise to the Caribbean, visited a “play with me” hotel (that’s what K called it – it was filled with toys and activities for kids), visited an animal hotel and waterpark (again, that’s what K calls it – Great Wolf Lodge), and visited Niagara Falls.

Final Thoughts

I am beyond happy that I compiled this post! It really was nice to remember so many things we did, read, and accomplished over this past school year. It’ll be good to reflect on these successes when homeschooling gets hard (as it inevitably will).

When I started homeschooling, I knew that we didn’t “have to” start until 2025, the year K turns 6 and would enter first grade, but I attended preschool when I was 3 and 4 years old. Since K was showing signs that she was ready to learn, it just felt right to start doing more formalized schooling in addition to all of the natural learning opportunities that pop up throughout each day.

There are a variety of resources that we have that I didn’t include in this post because we either haven’t used them yet or haven’t used them enough for me to share about them yet. I’m looking forward to seeing what we’ll do and use in the coming year!

Thanks for joining us today In Our Homeschool.