Our Preschool Life began when veteran homeschool authors Sonya Shafer and Karen Smith became grandmothers.
Taking the Charlotte Mason principles they had used to create the award-winning Simply Charlotte Mason curriculum, Sonya and Karen created an unhurried, natural preschool curriculum that would nourish 3–5 year old children and prepare them for formal school lessons in 1st grade.
Guided by the Timeless Principles of the Charlotte Mason Method
- Young children benefit more from interacting with real people and exploring their surroundings than from screens.
- Parents should intentionally cultivate good habits in their children’s lives.
- Each child should be respected and educated as a complete and unique person.
- Preschool children learn best through informal play in a loving and language-rich home environment.
- Young children should learn primarily with objects, rather than symbols.
- A child’s tastes are cultivated by the books, art, music, stories, and poetry he is given.
Based on Proven Preschool Educational Foundations
Encouraging child-led discovery and learning in everyday life.
Creating an atmosphere that values each child as an individual.
Providing a wide variety of good, true, and beautiful ideas for children and parents.
Keeping activities simple and short yet filled with potent and natural educational possibilities.
Focusing on a goal of growth as a person, rather than academic skills.
Meet Sonya and Karen
We have a combined experience of raising 8 preschoolers and educating for more than 50 years of homeschooling. We both studied child development at the college level. As homeschoolers, we have cultivated the habits of researching, testing, tweaking, and thinking. As publishers of homeschool curriculum, we have developed a passion to encourage parents and make things as simple as possible for them. We are now grandparents, keeping in personal touch with what the current generation of parents and young children needs.
When we were parents of preschoolers, we were always looking for activities that we could do with our children that would be (1) short, simple, and educational; activities that would (2) help the child to grow as a person, in all aspects of personal development; activities that (3) could become a natural part of life in our homes, not some artificial classroom-style lessons that required sitting down with worksheets. Through the years, we made note of which activities worked well, which did not, and what we wished we had done differently.
Later, as we traveled across the country, exhibiting and speaking at homeschool conventions every year, we encountered parents of preschoolers who either did not know about those simple and classic activities or were so busy that they had forgotten about them.
We decided to create a resource that would pass along timeless ideas that worked well for us as mothers of preschoolers. Also, our oldest grandchild was approaching three years old at the time, and we wanted to create something for her. Since we were using the Charlotte Mason Method in our home schools and seeing the wonderful results of it, we used that as a framework.
Get Started with Play-Based Preschool Learning
Our Preschool Life gives parents a repertoire of activities and tools that they can have on hand to engage productively with their children and encourage their natural growth as that child is playing and learning in everyday life.
