Toddler Homeschool

Home-schooling to avoid vaccines

2008-10-23T21:53:00.003-04:00

I just read this article on Parentdish.

Apparently some people are homeschooling just to exempt their kids from mandatory vaccinations. Personally I think vaccinations are important and disagree with those who choose not to. I really hope that isn't the only reason they are choosing homeschooling though.

There is talk about whether homeschoolers should be required to be vaccinated and honestly, I agree that they should. The point of mandatory vaccination is because the more people that don't vaccinate, the more likely the disease will come back. This is more important in a social setting like school but is important just in general too.

Homeschooling Break

2008-10-05T12:49:00.003-04:00

Well we didn't do any homeschooling this week, well except for talking and reading books on the subject and going to playgroup. Our subject was supposed to be All About Me. I don't know how much homeschooling we'll do next week either as I'll be recovering from the surgery (see side bar.) So we'll just call this a homeschooling reprieve. If I can post next week I'll do some general homeschooling posts.

Autumn Week

2008-09-28T23:50:00.000-04:00

Our theme this week was Autumn.

We took a neighbourhood walk and collected leaves which we glued on our tree. There was more but they kept falling off.

Alastrin painting with Autumn colours

Morgan painting with Autumn colours
Alastrin making apple prints

Morgan making apple prints

Not picured is our demonstration of the four seasons. I did a quick drawing of a tree and a person in each season illustrating what happened to the tree and what kind of clothing you would wear in each season.

We also read autumn books and sang a few autumn songs and I answered all kinds of questions everytime we were outside about squirrels and leaves.

We didn't do as much as I'd planned, this was sort of a laid back week.

Childhood Language Delays Go Unrecognized by Parents

2008-09-24T12:20:00.006-04:00

One out of every twelve kids less than five years of age in Canada experiences a delay in language development. Yet a recent poll has revealed that 94% of Canadian parents of children under five rate their child’s language skills as average or above indicating that there is a potential to not recognize speech and language delays in pre-school children.

As a result, many children may be starting school without the fundamental language and early literacy skills that ensure academic success – and some of those children may never catch up.

Angus Reid Strategies conducted a one-day online survey on behalf of The Hanen Centre. The Hanen Centre is a not-for-profit authority in the development of family-focused early language intervention programs and learning resources. The survey was conducted among a randomly selected, representative sample of 1003 adult Canadians. The full report of their findings can be downloaded here. (pdf)

One of the learning resources available from The Hanen Centre is a calendar that can help parents of preschoolers to incorporate language and literacy tips into daily activities and play routines.

Here's a sampling of the tips included in the calendar:

* Follow the child's lead in conversation and keep conversations going as long as possible

* Create an environment full of meaningful print

* In addition to reading books together, make grocery lists, write birthday cards and read advertising flyers

* Use unfamiliar vocabulary in everyday conversation, explaining what the words means

I will be receiving a copy of this calendar and will add to this post after I see it with my thoughts.

UPDATE: I've received my copy! The calendar has 8 tips for each month, 4 for in the classroom and 4 for at home. The classroom tips and home tips are similar under each category, but just tailored for teacher vs parent, class vs children. There are four categories of tips for each month: Daily Activities, Pretend Play, Reading Books and On The Go.

Each month is dedicated to a different skill/idea such as Follow the Child's Lead in Conversations, Increase Children's Everyday Vocabulary, Stimulate Children to Think Beyond the Here-and-Now and Encourage Play with Sounds, Syllables and Words.

The ideas are great and are things every parent (and teacher) should be doing with the children in their care. I've been doing most of these activities since my children were born and people often remark that they think they are older than they are because they talk so well and have such a rich vocabulary. I'm not trying to brag I just want to illustrate that I can vouch for these ideas. Below is a sample of some of the ideas.

In the Classroom:

Use new words when pretending with the children and explain them by using simpler, familiar words. "I am anxious because I can't find my baby. I am very worried." Use the new words often in other situations.

Ask children to find pictures in an alphabet book that begin with a certain letter. When they find the correct picture, talk about the sound the letter makes.

At home:

Read the words on cereal boxes. Count the number of words on each box and see if any have the same letters. Talk about words and letters and point to the words as you read them.

Collect souvenirs from a trip. Use the items to inspire your child to dictate a story about the trip. Create a book from his story and read it with him. Leave it where he can "read" it himself.

The poster is a quick at-a-glance chart that summarizes the emergent literacy skills that children need to learn and what months you will find activities for that skill in the calendar.

My only suggestion for a way to make this product better would be to make the calendar also usable as a calendar. Right now the ideas are printed across the weeks so you can't use the calendar as a calendar itself.

Transportation Week

2008-09-21T19:56:00.006-04:00

The above picture is because this post is being linked to other blog posts on teaching tots. click the picture to see more.

This week our theme was transportation. I further separated each day into a specific kind or kinds.

Monday - Planes and other Air Craft
Tuesday - Trains
Wednesday - Cars and Trucks
Thursday - Buses and other vehicles
Friday -Boats

Things didn't go exactly as planned (do they ever?) and so some activities crossed into others days. We didn't finish everything I had planned but also did some things I didn't have planned. We also did some basic street safety.

MONDAY - PLANES

I don't have any pics for Monday. We made a cardboard plane but the pic isn't very good so I didn't include it. We went to playgroup today and airplanes were overhead on the way so we talked about them. I asked questions such as where do planes fly? Are they big or small? I said how planes are really big but they are up so high they look small. She doesn't really understand that though. We read a book about airplanes too.

TUESDAY - TRAINS

Here Morgan is making a number train. she has 5 train cars with numbers on them and she has to glue them on my hand drawn train tracks in order. Then she colored them in. She liked this activity. I believe it was one of Jan Brett's pages.

Alastrin colored a train picture.
This wasn't on the plan but since we didn't have a chance to see a real train, I called up You Tube and searched for trains and we watched a few videos of trains. The one pictured was her favourite. You could see the lights of the trains for a while before you saw the train. I didn't but I would suggest you screen you tube videos before showing them to your children. We didn't stumble upon anything bad but we could have.
Way back when I was pregnant with Morgan, our friend Jay gave us this train set that used to be his. Until now I had never brought it out but since we were learning trains, I did. It's beat up and needs batteries which we didn't have but Morgan liked it. When it first started moving (the old batteries lasted a minute) she was scared of it! She's still a little young as she wants to push it around the tracks and it's not made to do that. It's completely electronic.

We also made an egg carton train but it didn't turn out great so I didn't post a pic.

WEDNESDAY - CARS AND TRUCKS

Wednesday we didn't do much structured homeschooling as we went to playgroup in the morning and Girl Guides after dinner. We did talk about cars and trucks on the way to playgroup and watched a recycle truck at work on the way home. She did a traffic patterns worksheet from Bry Back Manor but our main craft waited till Friday. (see below)

THURSDAY - BUSES AND OTHER

We made this cool egg carton school bus. The yellow paint didn't cover the words on the carton though like it was supposed to so we glue yellow construction paper over it as well. I couldn't find magazine photos of kids though so it's adults in the bus. Oh well. It's just the top half of the carton so she can't drive it around or anything, it's just for show.

Thursdays we go to the library and to their playgroup so we didn't do much that day either. We did see a firetruck go by and talked about that. They had bus colouring pages too and we sang the wheels on the bus and read her Seals on the Bus book (by Lenny Hort)

FRIDAY - BOATS

We got an activity sheet from Enchanted Learning that had her trace the letter b, colour in a picture of a boat and then cut out some pieces to make a boat. The picture above is showing her decorating in her boat picture after gluing the pieces down. She loved this too.

Alastrin with another colouring page.

As stated above, we did our cars and trucks craft on Friday. They painted by rolling toys cars and trucks through paint on their paper. This was a hit.

Here is Alastrin doing her craft.

Not pictured for this week: more transportation books, practicing street safety, watching Barney safety video, watching Thomas the Tank Engine, watching Transportation Songs video, lots of chat about transportation as we were outside walking and a few homemade matching pages.

Next week is Autumn!

Opposites Week

2008-09-14T22:25:00.004-04:00

NOTE: Today I also posted the rest of the alphabet activities. You can find them after this post.

So this week was Opposites. I had trouble finding activities online for this other than boring worksheets so I made up a lot of what we did. We had books from the library that we read every day. Unfortunately Alastrin didn't do much with this theme.

After reading some books, we demonstrated opposites as well as some directional words by using things around the house. Here Morgan is demonstrated In. Other examples included: The cat is ON the basket, Alastrin is BETWEEN the doors, the tree is OUTside, we are INside, Morgan is UNDER the highchair, Morgan is stepping OVER the toy etc....

Here Morgan is working on a "game/worksheet" that I designed She matched up the opposites a couple of times and then the last time she glued the cards down.

Morgan was really confused with hot, cold, warm and cool so we filled four cups with water at the appropriate temperature and felt the outside while going over them. Then I'd give her two to choose from and tell her which one to find. When she had that one down we chose from three, then all four. She seemed to really get it but today she was confused again.

This is the one and only real worksheet we did. She circled the hot things in red and cold things in blue. She actually did this before the cup activity and got them all right, so she can't be completely confused.

First we built a bridge and then a house and used toys to demonstrate opposites and directions. Dora is IN the house, Ducks are ON the house, girl is BESIDE the house etc.. We also did behind and in front of but just briefly. She enjoyed this activity and did it on her own a couple of days later.

On the weekends we go visit the Grandparents and Grandma has an activity or two to keep us busy. This week she had both girls glue on a table and then glue objects either on top of or under the table. Alastrin did one too but she did it so fast and wanted to glue more on so she glued on fun foam shapes until you couldn't see the paper colour!

Grandma did this one with just Morgan. It's of course a house and fun foam animals are stuck inside and outside the door.

So it was a pretty laid back week with not quite enough activities. We also went to playgroup three times, one of which had gym class and we rode bikes outside one day.

Next week is Transporation!

Other Alphabet Week Activities

2008-09-14T22:03:00.006-04:00

I said I'd post a few more that we hadn't finished on time. Here they are.

This is the big project that took us two weeks to finish. For each letter of the alphabet, we stuck on something that started with that letter. It took us so long because we had to find all the items! Morgan absolutely LOVED this project.

In this picture: A is Aluminum Foil, B is Bandaids, H is Hearts, I is Insects (stickers), O is Oatmeal, P is Pumpkins (sequins), V is Violets (computer printouts) and W is wire (didn't work so well.)
In this picture: C is Cotton, D is Dog Food, E is Easter (stickers), J is Jewelery, K is Kidney Beans, L is Leaves (sequins), Q is Q-tips, R is Ribbon, S is Stars (stickers), X is X stamps (very hard to see), Y is Yellow Yarn and Z is ZigZags (ric rac)
In this picture: F is Feathers, G is Grapes (seqins), M is Makeup (stickers), N is Noodles, T is Toothpicks and U is Umbrellas (2 stickers and hand drawn by mom for the rest)

Chicka Chicka Boom Boom Tree Craft by Morgan. She chose to put the letters, on top of each other.

I just glued letters on paper for Alastrin and she colored on them.

Finally we made name bracelets!

Alphabet Week

2008-09-09T20:03:00.003-04:00

So week one went well. Our theme was the alphabet along with the book Chicka Chicka Boom Boom. We are still doing a few ABC activities this week because I had a couple migraines last week so we didn't get as much done. I'll post those later.

Here are some pics and explanations:

Exercising to the Alphabet Exercise DVD

Chicka Chicka Boom Boom Craft

Doing an alphabet puzzle

Sorting through alphabet pasta letters to spell out her name. She then put them in clay and baked it.

The little one (16 months) "typed" letters on the computer.

Not pictured is all the alphabet books we read, the alphabet blocks they built with, magnet letters played with, another Chicka Chicka Boom Boom craft, some drawing and "writing" and a Chicka Chicka Boom Boom counting book that we made.

Also the two activities we are still working on will be posted later.

Getting Back Into Things...

2008-08-16T18:29:00.003-04:00

Starting Sept 2 we will be starting a more planned approach to homeschooling. Morgan will be only 2 3/4 years old but she turns three Jan. 3 and already knows a lot for her age. I don't mean seat work, obviously she's to young for that, I just mean planned activities and themes.

For now, I want to share this article I found which I love: http://www.secular-homeschooling.com/001/bitter_homeschooler.html

Where We've Been

2007-10-17T21:21:00.000-04:00

I haven't quit homeschooling, just been busy and haven't had a chance to upload pics so I haven't posted about what we've been doing.

I will admit we aren't doing as much as we should be. It's hard to do organized activities with toddlers, most of your homsechooling is play. This also makes it hard to decide what constitutes part of our homeschooling. We've been going to the library and playgroup once a week where she plays with toys, learns about the current subject, paints pictures and does crafts. We've still been doing a subject a week. I will still be posting pics and info on each subject, so look for that this coming week.

We also had a death in the family on friday, funeral was today actually so I'll try to catch up next week.

Been a Little Slow

2007-09-18T14:55:00.000-04:00

The last two weeks we've been sort of lax. I haven't been feeling well and just haven't put in much time. Luckily it's not hard to homeschool a toddler as all play is learning for them. I have pictures of our week of Yellow and Monkeys that I will hopefully post soon but even that week was slow. This past week we had books on dogs but didn't even do a colour and barely did anything. We did go to playgroup though so she did some painting, crafting and singing. I'll be posting pics of her artwork as well. Today I have her playing with playdough and we've gone on a few walks where she's seen motorcycles and we are still working on the difference between trees, bushes and flowers.

Tonight or tomorrow I'll hopefully get all the pictures downloaded onto the computer and can then post them.

Picture Books Really Do Teach Toddlers

2007-09-08T08:20:00.000-04:00

This news article is actually from Nov 2006 but it's the first I've seen of it.

"Reading picture books to 18- to 30-month-old toddlers helps them learn things about the real world, psychologists find."
"Simcock and DeLoache tested 108 little boys and girls: 18 month olds, 24 month olds, and 30 month olds. Kids of each age were divided into three groups. One group was read to from a book with photographs, the second group was read to from a book with color drawings of the photographs, and a third group wasn't read to at all.

The pictures showed a child going through the three steps of building a simple rattle — putting a ball in a jar, attaching a stick to the jar, and shaking the assembled toy to make it rattle. The pictures came with simple text explaining the actions.

A researcher read the story to each child while pointing to the pictures. Then the child was given the ball, jar, and stick and encouraged to build a rattle.

None of the 18-month-olds, four of the 24-month-olds, and six of the 30-month olds actually finished building the rattle. But many of them got it at least partly right — and nearly all of them were kids who'd been read to."

I already knew that The Cuteness learned from books, that's why we use them. After a week (and sometimes a few days) of reading a new book, she can point out almost everything in the book and can sometimes "read" it to herself by turning the pages and saying the names of the objects on the page.

It's just nice to have some evidence.

Red and Birds

2007-09-04T00:30:00.000-04:00

This past week we learned about the colour red and birds. I decided do just keep going over the alphabet and numbers every week instead of concentrating on a single number or letter. As soon as I point out for example the number 1, she points to the other numbers and wants to know them.

Here she is looking at pictures of different kinds of birds.
These are the books we read last week.
Here are the red toys we played with
Art class! Well sort of. She loves drawing on her magna doodle (which is now broken.)
Next week is Yellow and Monkeys!

Week 1 - Science

2007-08-18T14:37:00.000-04:00

Cuteness loves magnets so we played with magnets this week. We will be continuing with magnets for another week.

Here she is learning that the two black sides won't touch each other, that the magnet is pushing it away. (Magnet Polarization.) She laughs as she struggles to
make them touch.

For Animal Science we are learning about Big Cats:
Tigers, Lions, Leopards etc... These are some of the books we read this week.

Finally here is Cuteness with her stuffed tiger.

Teaching the Colour Blue

2007-08-17T23:14:00.001-04:00

This week I am teaching about the colour blue.

I have collected all her blue toys into one basket and we occasionally take them out to play with and identify. (see left) I hope that by seeing all blue objects together she will understand what I mean when I say blue. (That I am referring to the colour of the object.)

She has all blue blocks to build with.

I point out all blue things around the room and that show themselves during the day.

I have dressed her in blue clothing all week.

As Friday closes, she can say the word blue but still doesn't understand what I mean when I say something is blue. But I'm not worried. She's only 19 months and everything I'm doing with her now will just help prepare her to learn more when she's a little older. In a few months I believe she WILL know what is blue and what's not. The most important thing is that she had FUN!

About Me

2007-08-16T23:20:00.000-04:00

I've wanted to homeschool my children since I was in high school. I had a bad experience with school and didn't want that for my children. As the years pass, I've heard more and more bad stories about schools which only makes my urge to homeschool stronger.

I now have two beautiful daughters, Cuteness who was born Jan/06 and Precious who was born Apr/07. As I start this blog, my oldest is 19 months. Most people I've talked to started homeschooling at age 4 or 5 but really we are always teaching our children, right from birth. At such an early age, we obviously won't be doing workbooks or homework or reading from textbooks but there is a lot we can do.

This blog is about my homeschooling adventure as I get started and then continue homeschooling my girls from toddlerhood on. This blog is for me as well as others. I hope that I offer some help to others who wish to homeschool early.