Homeschooling a Toddler: What 3 Learning Sessions Look Like

Have you ever attempted to homeschool a toddler? If you have, you have probably realized how they are extremely tactile, how they love to explore new and exciting things and how they have a short attention span. To maximize this precious one-on-one time with them, it is important to focus on one thing and one thing only: flexibility.

With toddlers, as with infants and newborns, it doesn't matter how prepared you are or how much you have planned for this time. It will happen in their time and in their way. As stressful as that may sound, in the end, it is best to follow the child because that is how she learns best.

Here, I present to you three easy review lessons to keep things short, fun and moving along. This is not to tell you what to teach or how to teach it, but rather how it works for our family in hopes that this will inspire you to get ideas and come up with your own fun and easy activities that your toddler will simply love and enjoy revisiting when you invite her again to join in. 

These lessons are geared for toddlers that are 2-3 years old, but you can start some of these activities sooner and make them more complex as they get older and/or master the skills. 
The amount of time each session takes varies. I follow her and keep an eye on her attention span for that day. I usually have more material than what we use, just to be ready. Usually, our lessons are about 30 minutes long, but sometimes as little as 15 minutes, so we break up our lesson into two parts and come back later for the other half.

Homeschooling Journal: April 2014 Part 6

French: Action Verbs

We practiced the motions as we learned the action words in French.

Marche: Walk             Assis: Sit

Debout: Stand Up      Danse: Dance

Tourne: Turn Around  Saute: Jump/Hop

Court: Run                 Dorme: Sleep

Read on

Homeschooling Journal: January 2014 Part 4

This is what we did in our homeschool during the middle and towards the end of January 2014.

Soccer Season

K is doing so much better this year. Last year, he had just turned 3 when he started. He wasn't very interested, he didn't understand the game very well and he felt a bit out of sorts because he was the youngest one in the group (ages 3-5). This year, he is loving it so much and doing much better. He still hasn't scored any goals, but at least he is running in the right direction, haha!

How Nightcrawlers Taught My Toddler the Alphabet

                    

Homeschooling June 2013 Part 5

Good morning! I love it that we can hang out and chill in the mornings.

Today, K had a trial piano lesson. He did well, but I think I'll be  teaching him at home. There is a lot to do before actually learning to play the piano (finger dexterity exercises, patterning, notes and "values" of notes, etc). We have three or 4 play pianos, so we will work on all this stuff and look for a reasonably-priced piano in the meanwhile.

Homeschooling Baby Girl

Sight words

Painted toenails and anklet (yes, it has nothing to do with homeschooling, but it was too cute to not share)

Learning the letters in the alphabet.

Sight words and matching pictures

Basic shapes

Big and small basic shapes

The colors

Learning the colors and shapes in those colors

Numbers one through five

Bible stories. I make them short and sweet and dramatize with my voice a lot.

Letters A though E. She pretty much knows all of these.

A few times a week, she watched educational DVDs that teach her sight words.
These are Your Baby Can Read. They have been very successful with K
and his reading skills, so now we are using them with A.

Homeschooling: Circle Time

Continents, calendar, months of the year, days of the week, memory verse, etc.

Montessori Culture (Geography): Landforms

Nomenclature

I forgot to color the nomenclature cards (I only colored the answer keys),
so I improvised and made it part of the lesson. K helped color the cards with me.

Not perfect, but anything kid-made is wonderful.

Showing K bays and lakes on the inflatable globe.

Showing K peninsulas, islands, capes, etc. on the globe.

Showing K straits, isthmuses, etc. on the globe.

Sandpaper landforms

Sandpaper landforms and nomenclature cards.

Sandpaper landforms and nomenclature cards.

Sandpaper landforms and nomenclature cards. Suite and archipelago

Household experiment: going paperless

I bought 14 hand towels for $4 at Wal-mart to begin our experiment. I wanted to try it out before spending a ton of money on good quality cloth napkins. We have been using these instead of paper napkins and it for a couple of weeks and the experiment is a success! If the napkins don't get too dirty, we can use them multiple times, so it even save us money by not having to wash several a day. We have only had to use paper napkins once (when we had guests come over). Now, I'll be on the hunt for good quality cloth napkins that we can use.