This morning my five year old asked me if birds have bones while I was still holding my coffee in the corner of our classroom. My three year old was on his stool at the big table, humming something he called a song and lining up counting bears in a row. I had not opened a single book yet. I had not said the date or the weather or anything a schoolroom does. And I thought, this is it, this is the whole thing, this is what people mean when they ask me where to start.
Because that is the question. It comes in my inbox almost every week, dressed up a few different ways. What curriculum do you use. What do I buy first. How much should a four year old know. But underneath all of them is the same small, tired question: where do I even start?
Here is my answer, and I know it is not the one you came for. Start by telling me who you are mama to.
Not what grade. Who.
When a mama tells me "I have a kindergartener," I do not actually know anything yet. Kindergarten is a label somebody else made up. It is useful for sorting printables, and honestly that is about the extent of it.
But when a mama tells me "I have a five year old who will sit for forty minutes if there is a bird in it and cannot sit for four if there is not," now we are talking. Now I know something. Now I can help.
So before you buy anything, before you build a schedule, before you look at one more photo of somebody's beautiful shelf, sit down with a scrap of paper and write your children's names. Under each name, write three things. Not goals. Not deficits. Three true things.
Mine, this week, look like this. Eli, five, wants to know how everything works and will argue with a book. Loves being read to more than anything on earth. Melts down at eleven if he has not been outside. Judah, three, does everything his brother does about ninety seconds later. Puts things in rows. Will do anything if I sing it.
That is my curriculum consultation. That is more useful to me than any scope and sequence I have ever read, because those three lines tell me that we read in the morning, we go outside before eleven, and I should stop being annoyed that Judah lines up the counting bears instead of counting them. He is sorting. That is math. I just was not looking at it right.
What to actually do tomorrow morning
I promised myself this site would never just be encouragement. Encouragement is lovely and it does not get you through a Tuesday. So here is a thing you can do tomorrow, and it takes five minutes.
Set the table the night before. One thing per child. A worksheet, a book, a bowl of buttons, whatever. Put it at their seat, face down, and put a pencil beside it. That is it. That is the whole system.
In the morning, when they come down, do not announce school. Just sit down at your own seat with your own coffee and turn your paper over first. They will come. Mine always come. Curiosity is stronger than compliance and it costs you nothing.
Then say this, out loud, before you start anything:
"Lord, thank you for this morning and for these boys. Help us be kind and help us be curious. Amen."
Nineteen words. My three year old has it memorized. On the mornings I skip it, I feel the difference by nine thirty, and I am not being poetic about that.
If you want one page to start with
You do not need a stack. You need one page that your specific child will actually lean over.
If your child is somewhere in the letters, the Letter B page gives you a sound, three picture words, a find-and-circle and tracing lines, which is about the right amount of work for one sitting at that age. If your child is a sorter like Judah, the Woodland Math patterns page does patterns, big and small, and numbers four through six without ever feeling like a test. If you have an older one who wants facts, the history page about the first Americans is mostly a Big Idea box you read out loud, three picture books to go find, and five questions to talk about, and honestly it works best on the couch. And the New York and Connecticut states page has been a surprise favorite here because coloring a state on a map feels like a secret to a five year old.
Every worksheet is four dollars, or two if you are a member, and membership is free and stays free. When you join you also get the three printables I actually use myself, a weekly rhythm chart, a morning basket guide and a nature walk list. I am not holding those back for a sale. They are the bones of our week and I would rather you have them.
Then tell somebody
The lonely part of this is real and nobody warns you. So once you have written your three lines per child, go put them somewhere another mama can read them. That is exactly what the members' forum is for, and it is moderated, with rooms sorted by age, by season, and one for the hard days, because there are hard days and pretending otherwise helped nobody.
If you are still deciding whether to do this at all, I wrote out my honest case for homeschooling and the questions I get asked most. If you need to know what your state expects, requirements vary quite a bit and I am not the person to tell you what yours are, so I keep state law links and the curricula we trust in one place for you to check. And if you are itching to make a space, the post on setting up a homeschool corner will save you from buying a desk you do not need. For two years we did this at the kitchen table, and it was plenty. We only built our classroom this past year, so if you are working at the kitchen table, clear one end the night before and you have a schoolroom.
What I am not
I am not a curriculum expert. I write every word here myself, I have two boys who are three and five, and some mornings I get it wrong loudly. What I am is one year further down a road you are standing at the start of, turning around to say the ground is fine, come on.
I am working on Guiding Lights, a faith-rooted full year curriculum, Kindergarten first. It is coming. It is not here yet, and I would rather tell you the truth about that than sell you a promise.
So. Tell me who you are mama to. Names, ages, three true things each. Then pick one page from the shop, set the table tonight, and see what happens in the morning. He is not asking you to be a school. He is asking you to lead them gently, at the pace they can actually walk.
