One of the top questions I receive is how to plan daily lessons in a Montessori homeschool preschool environment. In the preschool years, we generally do one lesson per day. HOWEVER, that’s a Montessori 3-6 classroom practice that exists in part because there are 20+ kids to give individual lessons to each day, so there’s not much time for more than that!

In a homeschool preschool environment, I like to play it by ear a bit more. I give 1 PLANNED lesson each day — but if the opportunity presents itself to give more than one, I take it! That opportunity might be that you see that your child is suddenly ready for an extension to a Montessori material, or it might be that he FINALLY chose a work tray for the first time and you haven’t shown it to him yet. My general rule of thumb is to have the planned lesson really planned and let the other lesson(s) you give that day happen if they fit in.

For the planned daily lesson, I like to try to touch on a different subject area each day. However, I’d also look at this from the perspective of: What work does your child choose on his own each day? If he’s getting plenty of practice with math and sensorial works because he chooses them independently every single day, then it would make sense to focus more on formal lesson presentations in language and go a bit lighter on math and sensorial presentations. We went through some phases where one kid would choose math every single day and not really look at any language materials on her own — so I would present mostly language lessons. And then after a while it switched, and she was totally into language and wouldn’t choose math on her own at all — and so the lessons I planned switched accordingly.

If you have a daily Circle Time, that is a great time to touch on subjects like and math and language without it being the main lesson for the day, or to add an extra lesson in those subjects. For example, with the calendar you can get the number of bead bars that corresponds to that day’s date. Or you can think of as many words as you can come up with that start with a specific letter of the alphabet each day, or come up with rhyming words together. Then you can stick with doing a lesson from a different section each day, while still getting in plenty of math and language practice without it seeming like a lesson.

Once your child is at the Kindergarten age, that’s when I’d really start adding more language/math work daily in addition to a lesson from a different section.

If you’d like to learn more about how to do Montessori homeschool preschool, check out my e-courses!