How to Homeschool a 5 Year Old
Homeschooling a 5 year old is an adventure. A whole new world of learning is waiting for your rambunctious and curious child. Your challenge is finding the right homeschooling strategies and resources to open up that world.
The following information will help you do that, by providing you with guidance on homeschool activities for 5 year olds, curriculum options, scheduling ideas and how Time4Learning sparks a child’s imagination. Topics include:
What Should a 5 Year Old Be Learning?
Five year old students are traditionally in kindergarten. At that grade level they should be learning basic concepts in reading, writing and math, and also be improving their motor skills by using hands-on activities. Additional learning goals should include:
- Writing their first and last name
- Knowing the letters of the alphabet
- Improving and practicing phonetic skills
- Recognizing and writing numbers up to 20
- Identifying time to the nearest hour using digital and analog clocks
- Ordering events in a sequence
- Doing simple addition and subtraction problems
- Reciting the days of the week and months of the year
- Using qualitative and quantitative observation
- Understanding the characteristics that animals share
How to Start Homeschooling a 5 Year Old
Homeschooling a five year old can be a bit like driving a bumper car — one moment things are going smooth and the next moment, boom! Minimize the “booms” by preparing yourself for the upcoming year using the following steps:
- Step 1: Check your state laws for compulsory attendance. Ages vary when attendance is mandatory, but it’s always safer to investigate the required days per year that you must homeschool your child.
- Step 2: Choose a homeschooling curriculum or curricula that fits your child’s learning styles.
- Step 3: Decide on a schedule. You may have to modify your schedule occasionally, which is natural.
- Step 4: Join a local homeschooling group that shares your homeschooling vision.
- Step 5: Set your homeschooling goals (don’t set concrete goals, as they tend to change as the year progresses).
- Step 6: Don’t forget to have fun and include activities such as field trips.
Homeschooling Planner
Start planning out your homeschooling days with this free easy to use daily planner.
What Should a Curriculum for a 5 Year Old Look Like?
Most experienced homeschoolers discover that there is no one perfect curriculum. They use a few different resources, depending on their children’s learning styles and their family dynamic. But there are some basic guidelines you should follow when figuring out what to teach a 5 year old at home. A homeschool curriculum for a 5 year old should offer:
- Access to subjects such as language arts, math and science
- Worksheets and other resources that will diversify your child’s learning experience
- Game-based instruction that makes learning more difficult concepts easier
- Interactive lessons that challenge and entertain your child
- Resources for parents that offer assistance with grading and portfolio creation
- Comprehensive lesson planners
- Subjects that correlate to your state’s standards
How Time4Learning Helps You Homeschool Your 5 Year Old
Homeschooling a five year old is challenging. So, it helps when you have a curriculum product that makes your life easier by providing interactive lessons that engage your child, parent resources, 24/7 access and an inexpensive monthly fee among other things. The 5 year old curriculum benefits that Time4Learning offers include:
- Activity planners and curriculum calculators that will help you stay organized and make plans for the year.
- A self-paced approach that allows your children to learn important math, language arts and science concepts at a speed that suits their needs.
- A multimedia-based curriculum that is great for all types of learning styles as well as students with special needs.
- Interactive lessons that incorporate fun cartoon characters that make learning difficult concepts easier for children.
- A focus on fundamental concepts in all the core subjects to help students meet learning objectives.
- An automated grading and recordkeeping system that makes it simple for you to keep track of your student’s progress and create homeschool portfolios.
Is Time4Learning the only online curriculum you can use when you homeschool your 5 year old? No. You can compare Time4Learning to other popular online curricula, to see which curriculum may be the ideal fit for your child. Remember that you can always choose to blend the best parts of more than one curriculum (called an eclectic approach) to truly fit the needs of your 5 year old.
Tips for Homeschooling a 5 Year Old
It doesn’t matter if you are a new or experienced homeschooler, every parent can use a helping hand. That’s why we included these additional tips. They will help you maximize your child’s homeschool experience and overcome the challenges that you might face on a daily basis. Use these tips during your homeschool year.
- Kids at this age love having fun, so create a homeschool schedule for a 5 year old that includes exciting outdoor activities, such as trips to the library and the local park.
- Use hands-on activities such as blocks, dice and board games for learning math.
- Provide plenty of breaks during the day to avoid burnout.
- Read out loud, sing songs and recite rhyming stories to build up your child’s vocabulary and communication skills.
- It’s important that 5 year olds interact with kids their own age. So, arrange social activities with other homeschoolers.
- Include computer games, apps and resources that will help your children become adept at using technology. Tech skills become even more important as they grow older.
- Don’t get caught up in how other homeschoolers or traditional schools are teaching their kids. What works for your kids and your family is the perfect way.
