Homeschooling Your Toddler or Preschooler
There are many reasons for homeschooling your toddler or preschooler. Some families plan on homeschooling their children for all of their school-age years, and so it’s a natural thing to do. Other families plan to send their children to school once they reach kindergarten age, but don’t feel that preschool is right for their families. Sometimes this is because they feel that their child isn’t mature enough to handle the separation, and sometimes it’s because parents worry about the over-emphasis on academics in preschools today. Whatever your reason, homeschooling your child can be a fun and rewarding experience.
When planning how to homeschool your young child, it’s important to remember that their most important learning tool is play. Children have so much to learn about the world that even when they’re just playing with toys, they’re still learning. Kicking a ball around outside teaches balance, improves strength and coordination, demonstrates the laws of motion, gravity, and cause and effect (of course, your three year old won’t realize that he’s learning physics!). He learns that if he puts more force into his kick, the ball goes further. He learns that if he kicks the ball down a hill, it goes further than if he kicks it up a hill. Your young child learns so much from every simple activity and isn’t even conscious of it.
It may be helpful for you to plan a curriculum for your preschooler. If you decide to do this, remember that a curriculum is more for your benefit than your child’s. A curriculum will help you to stay organized and reassured that you are actually teaching your child rather than just playing. To your child, however, everything should be based in play. He shouldn’t have a sense that there are “lessons” being taught and he shouldn’t be forced into doing any activities he doesn’t want to do. The goal is to foster a love of learning, not to make him dread sitting down to do worksheets for 15 minutes a day.
Some of the basics that parents want to teach their toddlers are letters, numbers, shapes, and colors. A good curriculum should also includes lots of songs, nursery rhymes, and books. One way to organize your curriculum is into weekly themes. As an example, say the theme for your first week is airplanes. You can read books about airplanes and sing songs about flying, planes, or the sky. You can do gross motor activities like pretending you’re a plane, flying around the living room. Fine motor activities can include making paper airplanes or other airplane crafts. If you teach the letter A and the number 1 during this week, you can point out the letter A in the beginning of airplane in the books you read. When outside, you can point out an airplane in the sky and say “One airplane!” For a shape or color for this week, you can teach grey or oval, and relate it to the color of planes or the rough shape of planes (draw an oval on a piece of paper, tell your child that this is an oval, and show him how to add wings and windows to turn it into a plane). This approach in homeschooling is often called unit studies. You won’t be doing a full unit study with your toddler, but you’ll become familiarized with the approach. Of course, you won’t always be able to connect everything you wish to teach to a theme, but it’s still a good framework for your week. Reading the same two or three theme-based books for a full week really reinforce the idea, and your child will still be picking up new details at the end of the week.
A fun way to remind yourself and your child of what you’re learning is to create a poster of some kind where you can display the letter, number, shape or color, and theme of the week. You can print images out from your computer, cut pictures from magazines, or draw everything yourself. You can even include a copy of a nursery rhyme or song you want to focus on each particular week. This “learning poster” can be simply on a piece of poster board, or you can pin things up with magnets on your fridge, or something else that works for your family. Whatever you choose, be sure your child has easy access to it.
When introducing items or teaching lessons, you should try to keep the activities as fun as possible. That can be easy and obvious for activities like singing, reading, and most gross and fine motor activities, but you may have to work at it when teaching letters, numbers, shapes, and colors. Here are some ideas:
Letters
You can introduce each letter by giving your child a coloring page with the letter on it. There are a plethora of alphabet coloring pages on the internet, or you can simply find a block-letters font and print out one letter per page. A good website for fonts is http://www.momscorner4kids.com/fonts/ – the “Basic Font” would work well if you want something simple. For young children, you should stick to capital letters for the time being. After they’re familiar and comfortable with the capitals, you can then proceed to the lower case letters.
Whenever you’re reading or just out and about, keep an eye out for your letter of the week. Point it out and ask your child if he knows which letter it is. You should also be pointing the letter out on his learning poster frequently.
Depending on the age and ability of your child, you can have him try to trace the letter. You can trace in fingerpaints, pudding, sand, whatever. This is a good way to slip “lessons” into play – if your child is already painting, draw and A on your own and gently encourage him to copy it.
You can create a treasure hunt for your letter. This also works well for numbers and shapes, as well. Put your letter on several index cards and hide them throughout the house (easy hiding spots, of course). If your child has trouble, give him one to hold so he knows exactly what he’s looking for.
Numbers
As with letters, you can introduce each number by giving your child a coloring page with the number on it. In addition to the number itself, you can also find a picture of the appropriate number of items – one airplane, two birds, etc.
Throughout the week, look for opportunities to show your child how many your number stands for. If he’s eating Cheerios, take out the appropriate number and help him count. Or as him to bring you two books or three cars. Obviously, there are limits to what you can do with the number your teaching – twenty books is a bit much, but twenty Cheerios is fine.
Remember to point out the number of the week on your child’s learning poster.
If you’re teaching a shape that week, draw however many of shape you need and count them. This will reinforce both ideas at the same time.
You can create a number book. A small notebook will work fine, it doesn’t have to be anything fancy. On the left page, write the number, and on the following page, have your child put the appropriate number of stickers.
Shapes
Again, like with letters and shapes, you can start by giving your toddler a coloring page with the shape you’re teaching on it.
Look for everyday objects that are the same shape as what you’re teaching. Books, TVs, CD cases, crackers, and sandwiches are square. Eggs are oval, kites are diamonds, and so on. If you have trouble with some shapes, you can make your own shapes out of paper, felt, cookie dough, bread, play dough, and so on.
Depending on your child’s ability and the complexity of the shape, you child can attempt to draw one on his own, or even trace one with finger paints, pudding, in sand, etc.
Colors
You can introduce the color when coloring in the letter or number coloring page of the week – let your child color with the appropriate crayon.
Wear a piece of clothing or serve some food that is the week’s color. For example, when teaching green, you can give your child grapes or apples, a drink in a green cup, and have him wear a green shirt.
Point out the color when you see it around. Most children’s toys are vibrantly colored – you should have little trouble finding plenty of examples.
Another valuable teaching tool for your young child is the field trip. Children need to learn about the world, and what better way to do so than by participating in it. Field trips can be as simple as a trip to the grocery store or as elaborate as a trip into the city to visit the natural history museum. Take your children with you when you go to the bank or post office or RMV. For places where they may have to wait, remember to bring something to occupy them. You can also arrange tours of places like fire stations, police stations, post offices, maintenance garages, airports, bakeries, ice cream shops, pet stores, and farms. You can see if your local high school’s marching band will let you visit and perhaps even participate in a practice. Your children might enjoy hayrides, aquariums, zoos, museums, pottery painting, visiting a senior center, and children’s plays and concerts.
As your children grow and learn, you’ll need to change your curriculum to fit their needs. If your child has reached the point where they recognize all the letters, you can modify your curriculum to teach them the sounds each letter makes. Each week, you can work on one sound. For example, the first week you would teach A and the short A sound as in apple. Look for books, songs, and poems about alligators, apples, and animals. You can teach about Johnny Appleseed, or different animals whose names begin with the short A sound. You can demonstrate addition on an abacus. You could do a craft related to animals – make paper bag puppets or paper plate masks. You can visit an aquarium or an apple orchard. Not only are you emphasizing what sound a certain letter makes, but you’ll also be teaching history, biology, math, music, and art. The idea is to pick a subject and find something to teach that begins with the sound you’re looking for.
Whatever method you chose or whatever you want your child to learn, remember to make it fun. There will be plenty of time for academics later. What your child needs now is to be allowed to be a child, to play, and to learn while playing.
If you start to feel lost, there are dozens of good websites that give specific lesson plans and curricula. Some cost money, but often the best ones are free. You don’t need to buy specific books when your library probably has anything you’re looking for. And why pay for worksheets that will just frustrate and bore your child? Be careful in choosing what materials to include, and make sure you preview everything before showing it to your child.
