Homeschooling a 5 Year Old

Homeschooling a 5 Year Old

Common Characteristics of Five-Year-Olds

Many five years old can feel different levels of separation anxiety when they are not with their families. The great news is that with homeschooling, you can avoid a lot of those problems. It can still be important to give your child short opportunities to have experienced without their normal support system around. This allows your child to practice problem-solving skills. Even more fun, these experiences give them stories to share when you are reunited again.

Other things that can be common to five-year-olds include:

• can be more easily reasoned with
• enjoys climbing, sliding, swinging, dancing, and other active pursuits
• ability to memorize their full name, birthday, and address
• demonstrating a specific preference for right-handedness or left-handedness
• playing make-believe and dress-up

What To Expect When Homeschooling a Five-Year-Old

Because age five is commonly the year for enrolling in kindergarten, parents who make the decision to homeschool can sometimes feel overwhelmed by the responsibility. Parents may ask themselves questions such as:

• Can I really teach my child to read?
• If I’m not naturally good at math, will I find it difficult to teach it to my child?
• How much time should we be spending on homeschool lessons each day?

These are questions many parents who’ve chosen home education will have — especially if this is the first year they are homeschooling. One thing to keep in mind as you start the adventure of five-year-old homeschooling is that most kindergarten classroom activities are done specifically because they were designed for the instruction of large groups of children at once. Homeschooling a kindergartener doesn’t have to look anything like classroom learning. It can (and will!) take place inside your home, outside in nature, and in all kinds of other places.

There are no “set” hours you need to be learning, no specific set of guidelines about what you need to learn by a specific time and no one “right” way of teaching or learning.

It’s possible that the most important thing you can teach your five-year-old homeschooler is that LEARNING IS FUN. Homeschooling allows you the flexibility to not only customize education for your specific child but to use the learning process as a bonding experience for your whole family.