preschool curriculum

How to Create a DIY Preschool Curriculum

Learn how to plan, gather resources, and create your own preschool curriculum that's perfect for your child and fits your schedule!

Vida Mercer

Nov 3, 2022

When it came time to start preschool with my youngest daughter, I wanted to create the curriculum myself. No big deal, right? This is preschool, after all. How hard can it be? Then, I started researching!

How many subjects are too many? How do I organize everything? Where do I get high-quality resources? How do I make a schedule? What is a scope and sequence?! After about an hour on Google, I was ready to just throw my hands up and buy a curriculum.

But I didn’t. I got more coffee, and I persisted. I learned a thing or two along the way. Now, I know that, with a systematic approach, putting together your own preschool curriculum can be a lot easier (if a bit time-consuming) than I thought it was going to be. So, I’m sharing the best tips I have so that you can shortcut all the trial and error and get straight to learning with your little one.

Plan the big picture first

Before diving into the details, you have to commit to a big-picture plan. If you don’t, you will be distracted by every new resource that pops up on IG. You have to decide what general subjects you are going to teach. Subjects usually group themselves neatly into one of three categories. Here are some examples:

Academic	Life-Skills	Extracurricular
Math	Social/Emotional Skills	Art
Language	Motor Skills	Music
Phonics	Character/Habit Training	Foreign language
Science	Religious Instruction	Dance
Social Studies	Cognitive Skills	Sport

This is the hard part. Don’t pick them all! Here are two guiding questions to keep in your mind as you consider them:

- What subjects does my child need structured support with in order to really progress?
- What subjects are not adequately covered already in the course of our daily lives?

For example, it might be tempting to include art in your curriculum. But does your child really need structured support for art at this age? Preschoolers tend to spend a good chunk of time making art anyway, and projects for other subjects will incorporate a lot of painting and crafts. So, why make it a separate thing? You’ll, likely, be doing enough of it already.

The same goes for science and social studies. If you’re reading lots of good books to your preschooler and answering their burning questions, there is probably no reason to add these subjects, separately, to your routine. Maybe throw in a fun science-y project now and then and call it good.

Think quality over quantity, because preschoolers learn best with short, frequent learning sessions. Packing in too many subjects risks:

- overwhelm (for both of you), or
- not circling back to the same subject frequently enough to have an impact.

Less is more!

Select your resources and materials

Here’s another golden nugget of advice for you that will probably seem counterintuitive—put the worksheets down and back away!

Worksheets are attractive preschool resources because they look fun (to us adults), make us feel like we are doing something educational, and give us a reassuring tangible record that we have accomplished something. They are misleading at best, damaging to your child’s love of learning at worst, and (most likely) distractors from more valuable learning activities.

Better options? Hands-on materials that you can use to count (math skills), flashcards to practice letter recognition and sounds (phonics), and household items that get your child ready to conquer a stack of worksheets one day (fine motor skills).

Here’s how to know what you need:

1. Create a scope and sequence for each subject you’ll be teaching. This fancy phrase just means a list of individual skills or learning objectives you want to cover and the order you will cover them in. (For example: letter recognition; then main sounds of consonants; then short sounds of vowels; etc.)
  
  How do you know how to do this? Try one of these techniques:
  - Google “preschool scope and sequence” for each subject you want to teach.
  - Google “pre-math skills”, “pre-reading skills”, “pre-writing skills”, etc. and place them in a logical order
  - Look at the Table of Contents for any preschool curriculum and see what is covered and what order things are placed in.
2. After placing your skills and objectives in a logical order, select a variety of learning activities that will cover each one. Try to pick activities that span different learning styles: visual, auditory, kinesthetic, etc. Consider your individual child here and choose activities you know will be appealing and engaging to them.
3. Gather the materials necessary to complete your activities. The good thing about preschool is that you probably already have a ton of the materials around your home or in your child’s toy box. Other items, like flashcards or charts, can be easily found as free downloads.

So, here’s the caveat. Some worksheets can be beneficial if used sparingly and for objectives other than writing. This is why you’re Googling pre-writing skills—because your preschooler is, more than likely, not ready to write for any length of time yet. This is, also, why those workbooks where your child is copying letter after letter are not age-appropriate and will likely lead to frustration.

However, a well-timed connect-the-dots page for number recognition or circle-the-items-that-are-the-same page can help reinforce other concepts and give a little fine motor skills practice.

Here’s your guiding principle: Use worksheets sparingly and never as an attempt to elicit a great deal of writing. If you want a record of what your child is learning and doing in preschool, keep a journal and/or photo diary instead.

Plan your schedule

As I mentioned, short, frequent learning sessions are key, but this doesn’t need to take a lot of dedicated time out of your day. This is another wonderful part of teaching your preschooler at home, learning activities can be worked into daily activities more often than not. Recite your ABCs in the car. Count the eating utensils while you empty the dishwasher together.

One approach is to make a list of objectives or activities you would like to cover during the day and look for opportunities to work them in. If you feel like you need a little more structure than this, try scheduling 10- to 15-minute blocks of time three to four times a day where you focus on a different subject.

Regardless of how structured you are or are not, it is a good idea to develop a reading routine: first thing in the morning over cereal, at naptime, before bedtime, and all of the above! Find a time that works for you to make sharing a book a regular part of your day.

Here is the single most important tip I have for you about scheduling . . . stay flexible!

Know that whatever incredible plan you make at the outset is untested. Your child may have very different ideas about when and how they are ready to engage with learning. Don’t try to swim upstream. Be open to shifting and adjusting when and how you approach the learning process in order to make it work for both you and your child. The result will be more learning and, most importantly, a better experience for you both.

If you would like to learn more, click on the image below to get access to done-for-you holistic preschool curriculum that will guide you through all the aspects of preschooling your child at home.

preschool curriculum lesson planning

How to Create a DIY Preschool Curriculum

Plan the big picture first

Academic

Life-Skills

Extracurricular

Select your resources and materials

Plan your schedule

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