So, how to do kindergarten in your homeschool? Whether you're brand new to homeschooling or simply wondering how to create a meaningful kindergarten year at home, let's dive into the possibilities.
🎥 Want to see exactly how I'd do it differently after 20 years of homeschooling?
Homeschooling kindergarten offers a unique opportunity to create a personalized and engaging educational journey right from the beginning. You learn to nurture their natural curiosity (& watch them learn without direction), foster that love for learning everyone talks about, and build a strong foundation for a purposeful, unique future.
You won't get clear on your ideas about homeschooling straightaway. Just consider this year as a learning opportunity for you: learning about how children learn, learning about your specific child, learning how to relate to your child, learning what you need, and building a supportive community too.
Get your Confident 1st Year Homeschool Roadmap and watch my exclusive video "How I Would Do Kindergarten Differently, Fifteen Years Later" where I share the simple framework that makes kindergarten homeschool joyful, not stressful.
Get your Confident 1st Year Homeschool Roadmap
In this "How to Do Kindergarten in your Homeschool" guide:
Is Homeschool Kindergarten Right for Your Family?
My Kindergarten Journey: From School to Homeschool
How to Do Kindergarten in Your Homeschool: What You Actually Need
Simple Daily Activities & Routines
Resources & Next Steps
Is Homeschool Kindergarten Right for Your Family?
I didn't actually contemplate whether I should homeschool kindergarten.
My oldest was already in kindergarten when I discovered home education.
I had picked up a book called The Homeschooling Option: How to Decide If It's Right for You after hearing from another family that they were considering homeschooling. This seemed backward and inconceivable to me. Surely I would not have the patience. Surely I would never exercise again or think two consecutive thoughts or be alone anymore. And surely the school system existed for a reason: why recreate it?
I definitely saw the challenges of this life immediately.
But here's what I also saw:
My daughter wasn't really learning that much in kindergarten. She may have picked up on some things in class, but there wasn't any challenge. She was primarily there for social reasons—which isn't bad, but it's also not particularly good either.
I noticed she was super tapped after class and wasn't emotionally able to regulate as easily as she had been before.
And practically speaking? I had to drive 20 minutes each way to pick her up and drop her off—with a toddler and a baby in tow. I had to wake my baby up at nap time to go get my daughter.
Meanwhile, I had already started doing activities with my second daughter at home: her ocean sticker book, her letter book, crafts, all sorts of fun activities I'd stashed in a kitchen cupboard. When I returned home from dropping my daughter off, I'd clean up the massacre of a kitchen, wash my face (hopefully), and then we'd sit and do activities for an hour at the table.
I was already homeschooling. I just didn't know it yet.
That's when I started seriously asking myself: how would I do kindergarten in my homeschool if I pulled her out? What would it actually look like?
Fast forward two decades: I'm selling all my homeschool curriculum two summers ago (or at least some of it), and families with six-year-olds are in my great room. Each of those kiddos was very different, but each of them was very smart and asking very interesting questions—and mom would eagerly answer all of those questions.
After two decades of home educating four kids and supporting hundreds of homeschool families and their children, here's what I've learned:
A profound education could be provided for a child simply by answering all their questions.
(By the way, don't try to do that because it would be exhausting. But nonetheless, a very meaningful, purposeful education could be brought to a 4, 5, or 6-year-old just by answering their questions.)
"But Is My Child Ready? Should We Start at 4, 5, or 6?"
What is the right age for formal learning?
Certainly there are books and research studies and a conventional education system that has many opinions on this. But I've raised four children, and these are my anecdotal notions:
Kids come out of the womb wanting to understand and learn things.
They want to learn different things. It's hard to entice them toward certain things because they just don't care about those things. But then they are deeply and eagerly interested in other things, and they want to follow those rabbit trails.
This is so because we're all different.
I'm sure you and I could speak to our own experiences learning since very young and focusing on various topics throughout the two decades we spent growing up to become adults. But we are certainly all different.
So how do you answer whether a child is ready for formal learning activities?
The answer? Observe them.
Do they want to?
Are they asking you to sound out words, read a book, explain something?
These are your first obvious signs.
Here are some additional questions to help you assess readiness:
Signs Your Child May Be Ready for Some Structure:
Can they focus on a task they enjoy for 5-10 minutes?
Do they show interest in letters, numbers, or books?
Are they asking "why?" and "how?" constantly?
Do they want to "do school" like an older sibling?
Can they follow simple two-step directions?
Are they showing curiosity about how things work?
Signs They're Not Ready (And That's Completely Okay!):
They can't sit still for more than a minute or two
They resist any kind of directed activity
Or they're still in a very physical/sensory exploration phase (climbing, running, touching everything)
You're exhausted just thinking about adding "school" to your day (girlfriend, this matters!)
They show no interest in letters or numbers yet
They need lots of free play time
My youngest likely sat longer than most of his peers—especially boy peers—but that's because he'd been doing studies with us since he was military crawling at 8 months. I share more about how this natural rhythm developed in 7 Things to Structure a Grade 1 Homeschool Curriculum.
Here's the truth: There's no universal "right age."
For my own kiddos, I knew that reading was an expected cultural expectation for kids around 5 or 6. So I sat down and read books with my first daughter. At the time, I wasn't taking the cue that it was challenging for her. I was determined to get my child to read—even if she wasn't capable yet—mostly because I wanted her to avoid the frustration of her Grade 1 teacher who had a reputation.
My first child began reading at 5.
With my second, I sat down to read with her and she naturally wanted to sound words out.
My second child began reading at 4.
Then, when I had come to understand that a child typically reads around the age of 5 or 6 and I was ready to "teach" my third child how to read, I discovered she was already reading! She was three—an exceptionally young age. So I tried to teach her phonics, which didn't particularly matter at that point, but I did it anyway because "that's what we did." I didn't spend a lot of time doing it because she didn't care—but she was reading anyway.
My third child was reading at 3.
And my youngest kiddo? Because he was a boy instead of my three girls, I was concerned that he would be above the average reading age. (It's not unusual for boys to be more challenged by reading.) My first child was 5 when she began reading, my second was 4, my third was 3... so I assumed my fourth might be 13! I joked. But I wasn't sure.
Sure enough, he was six. (And absolutely delights in his physics textbooks at seventeen, presently.)
My fourth child began reading at 6.
Every kiddo is unique.
Want to see what this looked like in practice? I share a detailed case study of how I personalized kindergarten for my six-year-old in How to Create a Homeschool Kindergarten—from his chess obsession to his approach to reading and how he learned alonimagegside his older sisters.
And here's what matters more than the age they learn to read: Did they maintain their love of learning? Did they stay curious? And did reading and learning become joyful, not forced?
The answer for all four of my kids? Yes.
Because I learned to follow them, not a predetermined timeline.
Worried about when your child will learn to read? I share the complete story of how all four of my kids learned at totally different ages (3, 4, 5, and 6!) and what I learned about reading readiness in How to Teach Kids to Read: A Tale of Four Homeschool Kids. Then grab your Confident 1st Year Homeschool Roadmap here so you can start with confidence, clarity, and calm.
How to Do Kindergarten in Your Homeschool: What You Actually Need (vs. What You Don't)
When I first started, I thought kindergarten needed to include specific school subjects: social studies, science, geography, logic, critical thinking, debate—you fill in the blank.
I suppose everything. Even in kindergarten! Ha.
I knew that I wanted to include writing activities, reading activities, and number activities.
Here's what I've come to learn:
Reading a boatload of books, just having fun together, learning about the world together, going places, meeting people, exploring—that is all you need to do.
It really is.
Kindergarten should be your most fun homeschool year.
(Spoiler alert: It might be a challenging year if you have other kids that are littler—but that's more about them being littler. Also, every homeschool year is amazing if you build your Burnout Prevention Plan.)
You definitely don't need:
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