Chrissy asks: I was curious what kind of things do you do during the day with your little one. Do you work on anything educational or just teach her as you go. Do you just let her be a little one without structured learning yet. I am not for sure of her age. Just curious?
Karis is currently only 14 months, so I have not as yet scheduled any structured activity time. As she becomes more interested in reading together, I will be start incorporating more things this fall. She is not at that stage yet where she can sit still for very long periods of time.
I love giving Karis a good amount of time to play by herself near by me. While I am making dinner or such, she will be exploring. She loves learning how to take things out of the cupboards and drawers in the kitchen and put them back. This is all part of her learning experience. It is also refreshing to allow her the opportunity to entertain herself without my constant involvement.
That being said, I am just beginning to use materials such as Slow & Steady, Get Me Ready by June Oberlander (thanks to Stephanie’s recommendation), which has wonderful weekly activities for ages 0-5. I have noticed that it assumes your child can walk at one year, week 1, which is really not that realistic for Karis right now, so I have starting back in the 0-1 category.
Just yesterday we sat down and played with different containers and lids and talked about taking the lids off and on, and which lids go on which containers, and allowing her to take them off and on. This activity was working on such skills as matching, eye-hand coordination, learning to follow instructions, etc. She really enjoyed it, but again, only lasted about 10 minutes. It was a fun learning activity, and this book is full of simple activities like these.
Karis is always playing in the same room while we have our family devotions and worship time in the morning, as we want to plant the seeds of the gospel as early as possible. I also try to read the The Jesus Storybook Bible to her while she plays beside me. This children’s Bible is excellent, but probably more suited for a little older children, but just reading it too her is planting those seeds. I love how each story in the Bible whispers Jesus’ name. The author uniquely writes and shows a little bit of God’s greater plan through every event in the Bible. It gives a beautiful understanding of God’s involvement throughout history. I am learning so much through this Bible!
Another resource I am excited about using is Mommy, Teach Me by Barbara Curtis. This is written by a Christian homeschool mother of twelve. The back cover describes it has a “user-friendly guide filled with hands-on exercises that will release your child’s independence, sense of order, concentration, self-control, and other basic skills-the kind of early experiences that will give your child a lifetime educational advantage.” I understand from others recommendations that the author has a fun writing still, and the book is very Christ-centered.
Other than that, I am planning on borrowing a lot of books from the library for us to read together, and participating, as we are able, in the family story time events at our local library. I like the idea of a providing a variety of different learning environments and the inclusion of other children and families. This could be a wonderful opportunity to build relationships with unbelievers in our community.
That is our plan for this next year. All in all our schedule will probably include 15-30 minutes of learning time in the morning, and then another 15-30 minutes of fun reading time some other time during the day, and then alot of time to play, explore and learn on her own!
For further recommendations, visit Stephanie @ Keeper of the Home, and her excellent list of resources for littles. This provides a lot of good ideas as Karis gets older.
I would love to hear of any other recommendations or ideas for beginning preschool education? Please share!
My mother-in-law ( a minister and art historian) along with a published teacher inspired me greatly in providing our son ample opportunities to explore and art media. Our philosophy has been to provide material slowly (large paper single bold color of paint or crayon- like only red or only black) and move through the whole spectrum, with different shapes of paper, sizes of brushes, sponges, eventually playing with mixing two colors, eg yellow and green. We have never expected him to create something. We don’t ask, “what is it?” We’ve simply allowed him to explore as you allowed Karis to play with lids & containers. We make some of our own media, too, because eating art supplies is, apparently, some of the fun. It has been most fascinating to watch him go through phases and fixations- making the whole gamet of scribbles to ‘field painting’ to simple (and hysterical) faces with stick legs!
My Mother in law makes a complicated and interesting argument for these phases and there connection to learning language and reading, which basically is that art skills develop in a sequential process, as do most skills. Hence we all must work through the skills through maturity. Reading skills correspond to the development of particular art skills- eg, the development of a horizon line in art begins to show up as the child begins to write/read sentences.
Well, anyway- we hold reading and art making to be very important, daily, activities.
Oh, I just love this age where everything is so new and exciting to our little tots! My husband is a elementary teacher. All throughout his college education and continuing education he was taught that having a solid reading foundation is the best thing you can do for your child’s learning career. You cannot start too early or read too much. Not to mention it’s a great time to take a breather and bond with your child. A great resource book my mom gave us is “Honey for a Child’s heart” by Gladys Hunt. She writes about how important it is to be reading to our children. She recommends many many christian and classic childrens book to take the guess work out of it for us. A great resource when your daughter gets a little older. Read read read!
As one of your other readers mentioned above, putting things to music is very fun for kids and it sticks in their heads. We’ve over used our Hide ‘Em in your Hearts cd’s. Does anyone have any good recommendations for any other musical scripture cd’s that aren’t cheesy?
On another note, do you or anyone out there know of a good preschool homeschooling program I can use for my 4 year old daughter? She has been through two years of preschool already(just because I was teaching her older sister and of course she needed to be involved too!) I’m starting to run out of creative ideas for her because she’s such a smart little stinker. I would love a bible based curriculum if you have any suggestions. Thanks. Keep up the good work!
I have heard good reports about the Five in A Row curriculum. They have a set called Before Five in A Row that is for preschoolers. I would recommend looking into this course.
Thank you Lindsay for your reply. A friend of mine
from church recommended this curriculum too but I
couldn’t remember what the name of it was. So
thanks for the reminder! I will check it out.
I came across your website for information on kefir and then noticed this page. I homeschool my 6 children, ages 3 – 16 and have done so from the beginning. Years ago we made a “Mama & Daddy Tape” for our younger ones which is a recording of us going over manners, character traits and verses, the alphabet, counting to 50, and songs that we made up to scripture. We play it for them while they play or do certain activities. Taping yourselves reading stories can be a nice for them as well, but not to replace time reading to the kids.
We, also, have continued to make up songs, we call Memory Verse Songs, to verses from Scripture which we felt would be beneficial to learn (for all of us to learn)! They now know over 50 Memory Verse Songs, some of which are entire psalms. This is an easy way for young children to learn Bible verses. We still start out our morning devotions with these songs.
We also start out our day with Calendar time, using a large calendar poster (from educational supply stores) with cut out dates that have fun pictures (we cut out slits on the poster on each square/day and attach with paper clips). I’ve made up songs for the days of the week and the months of the year. This time gives more exposure to letters and numbers as well as learning practical information. They then have a Bible story/lesson and either I or one of the older children play a file folder game with them, covering letters, sounds, numbers, Bible information, etc. We learned to make file folder games from Jan Vreeland (http://familylearning1.tripod.com/index.html). Click on Online Catalog and select Preschool for file folder games you can purchase very cheaply. You will need to cut some things out to complete the games, but this gives you a way to get started. They have a book “Games – Tools for Learning” which explains much more about game formats. She also does all-day workshops to really help you grasp game-making. We have loved using our file folder games. All of our kids still play them.
Hope this helps. And for the record, I’m not that musical, although my husband plays the guitar, so just about anyone can make up songs the way I did.
I agree that you have some great resources! You would probably also really enjoy The Toddler Busy Book and a blog called Chasing Cheerios. (sorry don’t have the link handy)
Thanks for the recommendations. My SIL has recommended the Preschooler’s Busy Book (which is in the same series) before and I scanned through it and it looked like so great ideas for creative fun activities for toddlers. It looks like the Toddler Busy Book is for younger ages (1 1/2 to 3 yrs), so I may just have to add that to my list of resources. Thanks!
Thanks for the fun ideas! I have a two year old and a seven-month old, and we have recently begun using the “Five In a Row” series. They have great kids literature ideas along with fun activities for kids of all ages, and include Bible passages and thoughts to go along with each new book. The Before Five in A Row book is for children ages 2-4, and we have invited a friend to our home twice a week for some low-key story and craft time together. It is a little chaotic and definitely not especially academic, but we have a great time getting our little ones together for early learning at home.
Thanks so much for sharing. I let my 13 month old play and explore and I never really pushed my other kids either and they all are very bright. Thanks for all the resources I am excited to check into them. As always I love checking your blog. I was excited to see my question answered. Thanks for taking the time!
When I got pregant w/my first baby, I told my close friends and family that for the baby shower, we $don’t want the normal gifts. I heavily dislike registries, and refuse to ever have one. (mainly because you can’t find what you want!)
So in lieu of gifts, I had asked that every guest bring their favorite book when they were a child. So we have tons of books, and I started reading to my children before they were born. That and listen to classical music.
So my subsequent births, I asked for no shower. We had a huge get together after the baby was born to welcome their arrival. Typically that was around 6 weeks.
We started using Slow and Steady when our second was three, and now we’ve used it from the beginning with our third, who is four months. We like it a lot. I don’t do everything, and we don’t do it all as written, but it’s a great help in understanding and practicing developmental/educational play. We did read when our girls were your daughter’s age, but only simple Bible stories and short, short books – mostly board books that had one word or one phrase per page, so that not much attention span was required. A book that contains about one stanza of a nursery rhyme or something comparable is about right, I think. My daughters enjoyed looking at the pictures and pointing things out when asked questions about the pictures and so on as much or more than the actual words. We are also big fans of the exploring her world mode of learning. We learned from John Rosemond to baby proof as best we could and set the baby loose to explore on her own. They start out exploring near you, and work their way out over time. John Rosemond also encourages reading (either fifteen minutes or half an hour a day starting from age six weeks or even earlier). He recommends reading things that have rhyme and/or rhythm, since the baby can hear and enjoy that even before the words are meaningful. I’ll have to check out the Jesus Storybook Bible. We’ve always used the NIrV Read with Me Bible, mostly because the stories are fairly accurate and my husband loves the pictures
Ours recently bit the dust, though, when our ancient, pre-children, pre-marriage cat that can barely get around anymore threw up on it.
Timing is an important issue in reading with small ones. When they’re raring to go is not the time. When they’re tired but not exhausted is a good time to curl up in mommy’s lap while mommy reads…
Thanks for the links, Lindsay!
We also use and love the Jesus Storybook Bible- it is such a beautiful way to show kids the unity of scripture and how central the Gospel is to everything.
Thanks for the great resource ideas! I’ve been enjoying your blog and all the great information. I have a 12 mo. old boy so I find you have lots of timely information for our family of three.
Soli Deo Gloria!
We use Slow and Steady Get Me Ready and we really like it! My girls are ages 4, 3, and 18 months. I also use Leading Little Ones to God. It is probably a little old for a 14 month old but I strongly recommend it for when your daughter gets older! I know i have some other book titles that would be of help for a 14 month old but I can’t think of them right now off the top of my head!
Anyways, your blog is wonderful and I am glad to have found it!