After buying gas today I realized that there is NO WAY we can afford tuition and gas to get our 3 year to preschool 3 days a week starting this fall (luckily I haven't fully committed myself). I am hoping some of you more experienced homeschool mommies can give me some advice on easy tools to help my daughter master her numbers and letters. She can already count and knows her colors and I would like to build on that. She is ready and willing to learn so I think the time is right.

Do you think it would be helpful to get in with a homeschool group? I am trying to stay away from the expensive stuff they have at the fancy education stores around here.

 I am going to start reading through all the past posts in this forum as well.

 I homeschooled many preschoolers some of my own and some other peoples kids. I have used  Homeschool of Tomorrow workbooks. You really dont need the teachers books. If you use the Math and English , it gives them a good start for school. Another idea is to go to www.pbs.org. They have a lot of printables for preschoolers. You can teach your preschooler better than anyone else. This is your child and everything you do is teaching. You might check with your local school to see what they have established for children to know when they enter Kindergarden. Babs

I use the cheap dollar store workbooks, flashcards and printables online for preschool.

I believe we may differ on what we expect from a preschool experience though. Our preschool year is practice for the following year at home. I am more concerned with my children learning to sit and follow instruction. If they pick up some of the material, great but the homeschool curriculum I use for Kindergarten begins with the basics so they can learn it then if not before.

Are you preparing your children for a public school or homeschooling experience after preschool?

Hubby and I have decided to have another baby, so I am preparing her for public school. Private school is now a pipe dream(we used it for your first when I worked) She is super eager to learn her letters so she can read like her big sister and I thought it would be a good experience for her to socialize a couple days a week at preschool but I am hunting for homeschool groups now instead. My husband is TOTALLY against my homeschooling beyond preschool and normally I would argue the point but I doubt I will have the energy for it.

I have to agree with Babs then. Find out what the school expects children to know when they begin and use that as your skill list. I think you should be ok with the cheaper workbooks, print outs, games and flash cards.

 My SIL lent me The Mailbox Math Book.  The Mailbox is a teacher's magazine that you may be able to find or request from your Library.  They are packed full of fun activities for preschoolers and we have enjoyed them.  We used internet site printables for learning to write letters in Pre-K (www.first-school.ws  has color pages and www.kidscraft.com for teaching straight lines and diagonals used in writing).

We made letters and numbers out of playdough and cookie dough, "drew" them in shallow pans of salt (we used recycled black freezer meal containers or a glass dish on the kitchen floor with black paper underneath-so you could really "see" the writing, I bought foam bath tub letters and numbers ($5-$7 at Walmart), and we really liked bath tub crayons.  I also made my own feltboards, 1 medium size and 2 small for traveling (simply felt wrapped around cardboard and hot-glued).  My mom bought packs of letters at the Dollar Tree and I made felt shapes also.  My teacher mom lent us a wonderful letters book called On Market Street by Arnold Lobel.  When you sing the alphabet song, leave out the word "and" as it is confusing (it has no letter), and lay some homemade or purchased letter cards on the floor in order when you sing the letters.  You can also write the letters in sidewalk chalk in order and have your daughter jump on them, as you sing the alphabet song.  When she has them down pretty well, start calling them out in random order.  To teach her name recognition, you can save your milk caps and write one letter on each cap.  Then write her name on a piece of paper and have her "match" it with the milk caps.

The main thing my much more experienced home school friends told me was read, read, read to your child every day.  Read quality children's books: the Little House on the Prarie individual children's readers-not the thick books, Jesse Bear series, children's poems (A.A. Milne, Dorothy Aldis,and many more), child-level nature/patriotic/animal books, Eric Carle books, Sandra Boynton has some cute books, some nursery rhymes, Richard Scarry books, community helper type books, and any subject that interests your child (ballerinas & ballet, animals, etc.).  ur Library has book suggestion lists for different age groups and you can pick and choose what you like.

Try typing Home School Groups with your city and state into Google and you'll probably find some in your area.  If you have a Chick-Fil-A, they usually have a story/craft/play time once a week.  Ours is a really big hit.  We were sorry when we outgrew it.  We met lots of nice moms and some fun children to play with.  Our Library had a wonderful story time with music and crafts too and some nice moms to talk to and nice children to play with.  We were sorry we outgrew that one too.

Hope this helps! 

 Forgot one more thing, our Pediatrician told us Preschool really isn't necessary for most children.  You mainly just want to get together with other children 2-3 times a week to learn to play with others, as opposed to parallel play (playing side by side with little interaction).  He said Sunday School counts as one interaction, if that helps you any.  The advantage to small Library story times or play groups is you can scope out the children's behavior and the parent's attitudes and choose the company your child keeps and is influenced by (a choice you don't usually get in preschool or public school).

And don't stress over it-have fun with your child.  If you make everything a learning experience, you'll both burn out pretty quickly.  We did a little activity, then some housework which I included her in, played, ate lunch and repeated that through the week. 

 I was recently reminded of a book that was suggested to me by a mom of 10 and used by many of my friends called Slow and Steady, Get Me Ready by Doris Oberlander.  It use normal household things (like keys, buttons, string/gift ribbon) to teach all kinds of things.  Mrs. Oberlander is a former Kindergarten teacher and the activities are really fun (one game we really loved actually taught the child both to follow instructions and positional words) and take less than 10 minutes to set up.  This book is a gold mine of fun activities to do weekly from 3-5 years.  We borrowed it from our local Library several times and copied the activities we needed.  If yours doesn't have it, you can request an interlibrary loan or if you contact a Home School group, several of the moms may have it and be willing to let you borrow it.  If you still can't get it, maybe try E-bay.  Hope this helps!

There are so many inexpensive tools out there to help little ones learn a variety of things. One of the most valuable out there that we have used is a video series that you can purchase from WalMart for about 6 or 8 dollars a piece. They are a part of the Leap Frog series and are called: "The Letter Factory", "The Word Factory", and "Math Circus". Our little one learned his letter sounds very quickly with the first video, and was reading not long after with the help of the second video. We also purchased a Leap Pad second hand from Ebay but it was so rarely played with, I didn't find it worth the cost. Some children really take to it though, and your local library may carry the cartridges for it. We also bought magnetic plastic letters and numbers which you can find at WalMart for under five dollars. We kept them on the fridge and and spelled words as we were eating and as he began reading, we would sound out those very same words. I think one of the other things we used the most were placemats that you can purchase for about 2 to 5 dollars and they helped keep our little one occupied while he was eating. There are so many different kinds out there: Numbers from 1 to 100, Map of the World, Manuscript Writing - shows how to write Capital and Lower Case Letters and Numbers, The Solar System, Time to Tell Time, The Human Body, etc. For Science, we would borrow library books from the series: The Magic School Bus and then tape the videos when the episodes air on TV, or you can purchase them for about $10 each or you may be able to borrow them from your local library. Whenever we read a story before bedtime, we would sound out the words in the title of the story. If you have a few extra dollars at a second hand CD store, you may find some preschool oriented CDs that will re-inforce the things they will learn through songs. So for the cost of a tank of gas, you can homeschool your preschooler with little to no prep work required by you and in the process, provide fun things for your little one to do over the next year!   

In a similar boat, with a DD soon to be 4. I'm such a slacker... my DD learns her numbers and letters with or without my purposeful effort for her to, by watching Sesame Street. (we like the classic ones from Netflix best though) But of course we don't want television, no matter what the content, to be our kids' sole teachers, but up til recently, that was plenty.. the online Sesame Workshop games are good too. She really surprised me with her reasoning skills on several of them.

But aside from TV, I am guarded about workbooks and "materials" hawked by the Homeschool Industry, simply because people can spend as much as they want, and in a way, it's like racing the car to a red light... because people who don't spend a dime can still teach their kids letters and numbers with nothing but a stick scratching in the dirt, if need be. I try to remember about hornbooks and nothing but a chalk and slate, when I try to stay realistic in the face of colorful, glitzy, expensive temptation toward all the Stuff my kid "needs" in order to learn the basics of reading and numbers. Granted, making it fun helps. And having the child actually ready and interested is irreplaceable, as I well recall from being a teenager whose normally agile mind glazed over and ground to a halt when in a class that I had less than zero interest in. If the kid literally finds a particular subject less interesting than watching paint dry, in my mind, that's when it's time to forget about that subject for the time being, because it will be time wasted trying to bull through, and no amount of glitzy expensive colorful Stuff will cram learning into an unwilling mind. Conversely, if a kid is interested, nothing you can do will stop him or her from thinking about it and doing everything possible to learn more, even if all they have is that stick and some dirt to draw in. So at its essence, learning doesn't require an industry to support it, and we as parents don't need to buy all those products. That won't stop me from buying some, though, but I will still ask myself: " Would we have more fun and get more actual enrichment if we draw/build/make this ourselves, and then color/paint/read it?"

Most of the time, when I am tempted to buy some item or another, if I ask myself that question, I put it down and go instead for some stenciling materials, or some poster paint, or something else creative, with a neat new idea for something really fun DD and I can do together to learn whatever it was, creating. I remember finding flash cards soooo boring, but what if I had had the chance to help make my very own?

As for the homeschool group, I personally have found those very helpful, but so far haven't gotten into a formalized one yet... finding a group of homeschoolers in your area that share your vision (or at least have something not incompatible!) is a great thing though, and well worth pursuing. That way, if you all decided you wanted a structured preschool experience, you could get together, and divide up the week and the kids, so that everyone gets a turn at being the teacher, but on the other days, everyone else gets a break, time to run errands or do personal things. It's a great system when you can find those others.

Good luck on finding what you need. 

I never found it possible to learn anything by stubbornly banging my head with the information when I genuinely didn't want to acquire it