Little Ones Learning at Home

Although my older kid does attend a fabulous (and too-expensive) Montessori during the school year, I've come to believe that at heart we're a homeschooling family. We believe in the foundational tenets of homeschooling--that education should be fun, engaging, and its own reward; that children should be permitted to follow their own interests to their own ends; that children should spend little time on crowd control, testing, and busywork and more time on creativity, deep concentration, and relevant learning--and put this into practice daily, regardless of whether or not my kid attends an official school that day.

With kiddos this young, we're obviously not reading Greek algebraic textbooks or building our own computers; what I do, instead, is keep a checklist in my head and make sure that every day, the kids create art, play actively, read at least a dozen books, are exposed to music, visit nature, and do some math/science enrichment play. For art, for instance, the kids fingerpaint, paint with brushes, paint with acrylics, color with crayons and markers and pencils, sculpt with play dough, collage, stamp, cut paper, photograph, and I help them with more elaborate projects like creating puzzles, greeting cards, quilts, beaded necklaces, illustrated books, etc.

Today, for instance, my kids fingerpainted this morning while I hung laundry on the line in the backyard, colored with chalk on the front sidewalk, the baby painted with a travel set while the preschooler attended dance class, and then the preschooler colored a letter to a friend while Matt and the baby cooked dinner.

Math/science is usually a trip to the local hands-on science museum, cooking, block play, counting, a computer game, playing with coins, gardening, or reading. The kids are absolutely in love with the Smithsonian Handbook series. Here are the ones we constantly have checked out from the library:

• Smithsonian Handbooks: Birds of North America -- Eastern Region (Smithsonian Handbooks)
• Smithsonian Handbooks: Trees (Smithsonian Handbooks)
• Butterflies & Moths (Smithsonian Handbooks)
• Smithsonian Handbooks: Insects (Smithsonian Handbooks)
• Smithsonian Handbooks: Mammals (Smithsonian Handbooks)
• Cats (Smithsonian Handbooks)
• Horses (Smithsonian Handbooks)
• Dogs (Smithsonian Handbooks)

Okay, jeez, that's kind of a lot. 

Today, let's see, the kids played with water toys at the local public pool, read about a billion books about animals, my preschooler and I played "silly counting" in the car, and Dinosaur Bingo while the baby napped. Wednesdays are when we visit the science museum:

  

Active play and nature are certainly not a problem, either. Today the kids played outside while I did yardwork, then we walked to the pool (the preschooler rode her trainer scooter, and the lesson was again reinforced that the path is uphill all the way to the pool and downhill all the way home), walked home, played outside, napped, went to dance class, went to the YMCA, came home and gardened, ate and they fell into bed. 

Tomorrow will be about the same, with the library in the morning and the pool in the afternoon, and a little dinosaur bath towel recycling project I'm going to get my preschooler to help me with.

Whew, how was your day?

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!