Jennifer Kaufeld - Homeschooling For Dummies

Use videos for those times when you must have 24½ uninterrupted minutes with an older child. If your toddler loves Blue’s Clues or Winnie the Pooh, those are the videos to keep back from general family usage for the sacred teaching hour. Pop one of the most-loved videos into the player and work with the other children to the sound of the Winnie the Pooh theme song.

Keep a stash of special toys in your school area. Maintaining a small crate of “school time only” toddler toys gives your little person something to play with that he doesn’t generally have in his hands. When my kids were toddlers, I rotated toys every couple of months; with a box on the floor and a box in the closet, the kids thought they got “new” toys quite often.

Use naptime to its fullest. Most toddlers still need to nap. If you resist the urge to crash along with her, the toddler naptime can function as your main teaching time with the other children. You can get a good one-on-one instruction period into each day if you concentrate on teaching new skills while the toddler happily snoozes. Then, when your recharged ball of energy reenters the scene, you can work on memorization skills, reading time, or other tasks that require less interactive attention.

Play “pass the toddler.” This may make your school days longer, but if everybody takes a turn playing with the toddler until naptime, you can work with the students who are left. Taking turns gives your other children a break from school time, and it keeps the toddler occupied.

Hold and cuddle if you have a lovey dove. Some babies and toddlers love to be cuddled. Nothing says you can’t hold your toddler on your lap while you teach. A little bounce once in a while and a nice warm hug may be enough to keep them occupied as they watch the siblings do their thing from the comfort of a parent’s arms.

Go to bed early once in a while. No one will report you to the Stay Up Late Police if you turn in at 8:30 every now and then. Putting the toddler to bed and leaving the other children in the care of Parent Number Two makes total sense if you’re exhausted or simply need an hour or two by yourself.

If you have more than one child, you know how much younger siblings pick up from their older counterparts. Much of it, thankfully, is even positive! Wonder what you can teach your first toddling homeschooler? You’re probably doing just fine already.

Toddlers learn best as they bounce around their world. Exploring life, getting into the mud after a rain, hiding stuffed animals in your best plants, and crashing for a nap after a hard morning’s play — these are the things toddlers do best. They play hard, learn a great deal, and generally sleep pretty well (as long as you’re willing to scoot over in your bed in the wee morning hours once in a while).

Incorporating your toddler into your day provides some of the best pre-homeschooling training she could receive. Talking to a little person increases her vocabulary when she’s ready to use it. Letting a toddler watch you spread peanut butter onto crackers or pour the daily apple juice shows him how the world works. You teach things like beginning cause and effect (what happens to the empty glass when we tip the apple juice jar over it?) simply by living through your day.

Here are some simple ways to incorporate learning into your toddler’s day:

Announce the colors of clothing and objects as you come across them. Not too many months will pass before your toddler knows the difference between the red jacket and the blue one.

Talk about clothing as you dress your toddler. Snapping, tying, buttoning, and Velcro may be old hat to you, but to your toddler it’s a whole new fastener-filled world out there.

Listen to different styles of music and talk about them with your toddler. While discussing musical motifs is probably more than your toddler has in mind, saying something like “Let’s listen to some Beethoven,” “Want to hear some Russian folk music?” or “How about some Fleetwood Mac?” fits right into the flow of things.

Talk about the people who come to your house regularly. “Here’s the mail carrier!” not only identifies that person who brings such cool stuff on a daily basis, but it also gives your toddler language that helps her identify that part of her day. By the time my children were preschoolers, they could identify UPS, FedEx, DHL, and U.S. Postal carriers on sight simply because they came to our house nearly every day.

If you know a second language, begin identifying objects in both languages. The younger a child learns a second (or third) language, the easier it is for her to assimilate that tongue. Of course, teaching a toddler or preschooler a second language guarantees some interesting sentences because young children use whichever word they think of first regardless of the language it comes from.

Your darling finally made it to the preschool stage. You’ve chosen your curriculum (see Chapters 10through 19for an overview of the options), painted the corner that you plan to use as a schooling area, and selected an assortment of pencils and crayons for the school adventure. Before you launch the educational adventure, step back a minute and look at your 4-year-old child again. Preschoolers barely sit through an afternoon snack without wiggling. You can’t expect to plant that little body that wants to move so much. Pack up the curriculum, periodically dust your corner, and enjoy your child right now.

Preschoolers explore their world, and they spend an amazing amount of energy doing so. They watch bugs, dig in the dirt, and play dress-up. They create imaginative scenarios with stuffed animals and then act out their adventures. Because every child is different, individual preschoolers won’t hit all the major milestones at the same time. One 3-year-old child counts to three, for example, while another may count to ten. Counting to number three is actually the three-year developmental milestone according to speech therapists. If your child counts past three, all the better! But don’t stress if your preschooler seems to take her time about mastering a few things. Preschoolers relish their newfound individuality, and they tend to do things in their own time.

Teaching with a preschooler around isn’t as hard a task as it sounds. Although your little person may insist on individualized attention once in a while, most 3- to 5-year-old children can amuse themselves for a while if they have to. A school time box with old clothes for dress-up time, some paper and crayons, a picture book, and a few favorite toys may be all you need to keep your preschooler happy while you work with the rest of the crew.

At our house, the preschooler decided that she needed to be in school, too. So, we took a little desk and stocked it with primary puzzles, pencils, crayons, paper, simple dot-to-dot pages, and some felt paper dolls. While I worked with her older brother, she sat at her desk doing her “very important schoolwork.” When she decided she was finished for the day, she wandered off to play with her toys. Who knows? It may work that way for you, too.