The first day I "started homeschooling" my oldest, I had a laminated schedule, a bin full of crafts, and a three-year-old who lasted about eleven minutes before she crawled under the table and would not come out. I sat there on the kitchen floor feeling like I'd already flunked something we'd been doing for one morning.
So if you're trying to figure out how to start homeschooling a preschooler, and every homeschool room you see online looks like a private school somebody runs out of their dining room, let me save you that morning on the floor.
You need a whole lot less than they're selling you. God already handed you the two things that matter most — your own kid, and your own ordinary day — and preschool at home is mostly just deciding to use them on purpose.
You've already been homeschooling — you just didn't call it that
Here's the thing I wish somebody had told me at the start. You have been teaching this kid since the day they came home.
You count the stairs on the way up. You name the colors of the cars in the church parking lot. You answer four hundred questions about why the moon is following the van.
That's preschool. Nobody handed you a binder for it, and you did it anyway.
The Bible actually describes teaching kids this exact way. "Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up" (Deuteronomy 6:6-7, NIV).
Sitting, walking, lying down, getting up — that's just an ordinary Tuesday at your house, and it's exactly how God says to hand your faith down. That verse took a lot of pressure off me, because it means the real curriculum is your regular life with God running all the way through it.
So if you want the plainest possible place to start tomorrow, here it is:
- Read a Bible story.
- Say one short verse.
- Do five minutes of letters or numbers — tracing, hunting for the letter B, counting grapes into two bowls.
- Then go outside. Outside counts.
That's a whole preschool morning. You can be done before the coffee's cold.
What a preschool morning actually looks like at my house
That's the list. Here's what those twenty minutes actually look like on a Tuesday, wiggles and all.
People picture six hours of desk work. My preschool mornings run about thirty minutes, and half of that the kids are moving.
What actually happens is louder than that. The Bible story gets interrupted by a wrestling match over who sits closer.
The verse comes out twice, because the first time somebody was hanging upside-down off the back of the couch. The letter hunt around the kitchen ends, every single time, at the snack cupboard.
We pile on and read regular books until one of them announces they are done being a person indoors — and out we go, because outside is preschool too.
That's it. Twenty good minutes beats two forced hours every single time.
A three-year-old is not built to sit still, and God made them that way on purpose, so I quit fighting it. When the wiggles win, we're done for the morning, and the morning still counted.
Start the day with the same five words
The one habit I'd keep if I had to throw out everything else is how we open the day. Before shoes, before spills, before anybody's fighting over the blue cup, we say one line together: "This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it" (Psalm 118:24).
My kids had it memorized long before they could read it, because we said it every morning until it stuck. It sets the whole day down on the right foundation — this day is a gift, and it came from God, even the days that go sideways by 9am.
I keep it where they can see it, not only hear it. Our "This Is the Day the Lord Has Made" Psalm 118:24 print hangs low by the kitchen table:
Right at their eye height, So it's the first thing they read in the morning light.
Read to them, read to them, read to them
If you do one "academic" thing with a preschooler, make it this: read out loud, a lot, every day. That's the whole reading program at this age.
Sitting on your lap, hearing your voice, seeing you love a book — that's how a kid falls for stories before they can sound out a single word.
The ones we come back to most are the Bible-story books and the ones about a little character learning to be brave or kind — but honestly, whatever they'll sit still for counts.
Let them wiggle while you read. Let them ask you to skip to the part with the wolf. Let them pick the same book nine nights running until you could say it in your sleep.
None of that is a problem. It all counts.
The days it all falls apart
I'm not going to pretend every morning is a sweet little scene. Some days the toddler dumps the crayons, the baby's teething, and the "lesson" is me hiding in the pantry eating a granola bar.
Those days count too.
Here's what I hold onto on those mornings: I'm raising a kid who's going to grow up knowing God is part of the whole week, right down to a wiggly Tuesday. One rough morning doesn't undo that.
Give yourself the same grace you'd hand a friend, close the books early, and try again tomorrow. Tomorrow always comes.
End the day the way you started it
We open the morning by handing the day up to God on the wall by the table — and bedtime is just the other bookend, where we hand the same day back to Him before the light goes off.
It's the simplest place in the whole day to teach a preschooler to pray, because they're tired, they're still, and they've got you right there on the edge of the bed. That last little prayer does as much for their faith as anything we did at the table that morning.
If you want an easy place to begin, our free Christian bedtime prayers for kids are five short prayers that rhyme — simple enough your preschooler can say them right back to you by the second night. It's the easiest homeschool lesson of the whole day, and honestly it's my favorite one.
So if you're standing where I stood on that kitchen floor, wondering if you're even allowed to do this — you are, and you already know how.
Start small, start with God, and start with the kid He gave you. Say the verse in the morning, read on the couch, pray at night, and let the ordinary days add up. That's the whole first year, and it's plenty.
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