Every now and then, especially in new homeschoolers seminars, some young mother who is considering homeschooling her children asks what would be a good "preschool curriculum" to use with her four-year-old. Dr. Ruth Beechick recently made the following observations for her column "It's Just Common Sense" in the Apr. 30, 2008 issue of The Homeschool Minute, an e-mail newsletter from The Old Schoolhouse Magazine. "Good homes like yours do not need 'school' for preschoolers. That is true even through kindergarten. All the research that show gains are studies of so-called underprivileged children, homes where children are rarely spoken to and rarely included in daily activities of folding laundry or mixing biscuits. Homes with no books and no reading. In homes like yours, researches show that preschool children learn about 1000 words per year without any vocabulary lessons. By age 5 they know an amazing amount of grammar without any grammar lessons. By age ten they use the grammar level of the people around them. You can see that they learn more language at home than they would in a classroom of age-mates. Conversation and read-alouds are the main vehicles for this vocabulary and grammar learning. The same works with numbers. Handling laundry, cookies, blocks, and other toys is experience with numbers, shapes, and other kinds of thinking. Preschool home life is a rich learning environment. School cannot improve on that. If you sing an alphabet song or chant the numbers in counting order, that is play. Older children usually do those and similar activities with the younger, so you don't get to repeat much with each child anyway. Just live the rich home life. That provides the best learning for preschoolers." AMEN!!!!! (And this approach helps avoid burnout which destroys a love for learning.)