Showing posts with label lessons. Show all posts
Showing posts with label lessons. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 30, 2014

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.

Monday, January 27, 2014

Spanish Lessons for Preschoolers and Kindergartners (Part 1)

Here, you will see lessons on: 
THE VOWELS, NUMBERS (1-10), ZERO, GREETINGS and THE ALPHABET.

I am currently teaching Spanish and French in our homeschool co-op (ages 1-5) and additionally Mandarin Chinese to my children. 
The only thing I stress is that I make sure they notice and know which language we are working on at the time. They switch gears rather easily and do very well. Even those who do both French and Spanish with me (on different days) haven't had a problem. I haven't thought of a strategy on how to teach languages to youngsters because I haven't really encountered the need to have one. 
My 2 year old was mixing letters. She knew all the letters in the alphabet in both English and Spanish, but she'd say some in English and some in Spanish. She is now getting better at differentiating them a bit more. 
Hope this helps.