Homeschooling for toddlers, often known as home education, is an alternate delivery method for formal education that relies on parents or other adult guardians to support learning.
The emphasis on “Homeschooling” comes from the fact that the “Parent” is the most important element, but it is not limited to being done at home because it may be done anywhere at any time under conditions that are conducive to learning. The teachers are the parents.
A school may also provide alternative home education programs, each of which uses a different learning facilitator. Examples include independent study at home and online. In this situation, educators continue to be learning facilitators.
Homeschooling for toddlers in the Philippines
Are you considering whether to send your child to a typical preschool or do preschool at home?
Homeschooling for toddlers can be full-time or as part of enrichment and learning activities at home, which is a popular option among parents.
Unexpectedly, preschoolers learn a lot of their skills through play. It can be entertaining and informative to design a play-based preschool program for your child.
Your efforts to nourish and awaken your child’s interests and disposition have a significant impact on their “foundation.” Additionally, students are acquiring abilities that they can utilize in the classroom for years to come.
Preschool particularly emphasizes the value of play in all educational activities, so this will be a lot of fun.
Benefits of homeschooling for toddlers
1. They enjoy greater emotional freedom.
Homeschooling alleviates a lot of the pressure that comes with attending school regularly. There is no need to succumb to peer pressure and strive to “fit in.”
Bullying, drug use, exclusion, and other forms of social pressure don’t exist. According to Susannah Sheffer’s book A Sense of Self: Listening to Homeschooled Adolescent Girls, teenage homeschooled girls did not experience a decline in self-esteem and went on to become happier and more emotionally mature adults.
2. They are not isolated socially.
The absence of social skills instruction for homeschoolers has drawn a lot of criticism. This is only partially true since they will have numerous possibilities to participate in extracurricular activities with other children.
When they take lessons in things like swimming, gymnastics, and piano, for instance, they’ll most certainly have a ton of pals. It is up to the parents to prevent their kids from being isolated.
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3. They could be more independent.
The homeschoolers admitted to being considerably more independent in their approach to life and learning when they were questioned in college.
They were fortunate that they had never felt the urge to blend in with the throng and they were far more resourceful and independent when it came to finding solutions to learning puzzles.
4. They can advance more quickly and learn at their own pace.
Public schools have come under fire from John Taylor Gatto, the contentious author of Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling.
As the children receive individualized instruction, he claims that homeschooling prevents misunderstanding in learning. Homeschoolers gain learning autonomy and are less emotionally and cognitively reliant than students in public schools.
5. Their special needs are met.
If a child has unique needs, the educational system could categorize and treat them unfairly. This could present a challenge and frequently carries a social stigma.
Children with ADHD must endure various forms of prejudice and challenges. In sensitive homeschooling, the child’s particular needs are never overlooked and they are always given top attention.
6. There is plenty time to practice “premium” parenting.
Homeschooling is sometimes referred to as “premium” parenting because the parent participates actively in the education of the child. With students from public schools, this rarely occurs.
They may, at worst, grudgingly receive homework assistance from their parents, but it will never compare to what a homeschooler receives. The parent may fully share in the pleasure and joy of learning because they are an expert in the subject as well as the teacher.
7. Flexible schedules make things easier for the entire family.
No rushing out of the home in the morning to adhere to various schedules, meetings, and other obligations. The length of classes and the timing of vacations are both up to the parent.
Many homeschooled kids can take educational breaks with their parents during the year’s off-seasons. Numerous chances exist for visiting parks, museums, and field trips. This could be the ideal complement to what they are currently learning at home.
Homeschooling programs for toddlers
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Preschoolers learn best when their curriculum highlights their natural curiosity through play. There are fortunately numerous options available, or you might deliberately explore your child’s hobbies while taking advantage of educational opportunities.
It’s not that hard to create a preschool program at home. Consider your lessons as supervised play with the objective of honing particular skills. When your child enters kindergarten, what do you want them to know? These are the items you ought to focus on first.
How do you teach preschoolers to play?
Preschoolers naturally have the ability to play! Adults must be careful not to overstructure play or put too much pressure on it to appear a specific way.
Preschoolers discover things by experimenting and playing in their own unique ways, which aren’t necessarily apparent to people around them as play. Consider these preschool activities to be play suggestions. They allow you and your preschooler to begin the activity without having a certain ending in mind.
What is an example of learning through play?
Play is a hands-on educational activity. Consider how we all innately know what gravity is since we have all dropped a toy, tossed a ball, or leaped into the air.
Even though preschoolers may not understand what gravity is or how it affects the cosmos, they have still felt gravity, predicted gravity, and played with gravity.
This is seen when young children begin to count. They might start keeping track of the number of objects in their shopping cart, their stuffed animals, or their cars.
Homeschooling schedule for toddlers
The simplest approach to get started if you’ve been thinking about homeschooling your preschooler is to start incorporating easy play lessons into your daily routine.
Adding 20 minutes to your daily schedule for learning is all it takes, or you can think about learning opportunities and lesson extensions while you are actively engaged in a shared activity.
Instead of using a schedule, establish a routine to allocate time for your homeschooling tasks. Your children will learn more effectively at home if you establish a schedule to help them develop positive habits.
Make a list of everything you have to do each day and rank it according to importance. Make sure to leave room in your schedule for flexibility because there may be occasions when you need to rearrange things, such as when you have a doctor’s visit. Even with interruptions, a regular schedule will keep things running smoothly.
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Homeschooling for toddlers: Homeschooling activities for toddlers
What kinds of games may preschoolers play?
In a child of preschool age, almost every single play activity can be a teaching opportunity! Although many preschool activities are themed to encourage further learning, there are countless other ways to teach preschool ideas.
For instance, if you are learning what the number five is and represents, you might search for five items in a book, create piles of five things in the playroom, or bake five cookies at a time. Ideas for plays abound!
1. Learning ABCs through play
The alphabet’s letters must be recognized as one of the first steps in learning to read. Children need to be able to recognize letters, sounds, and the relationship between capital and lowercase letters.
To help toddlers recognize letters and sounds, start with alphabet activities. Use these game ideas to go through the alphabet.
- Construct an alphabet museum. Each day, gather a new object from your home and put it in the boxes.
- Play a matching-lids game. Even alphabet letters can be put in the jars.
- Create some alphabet workbooks on paper. They are ideal for children who can sit still.
Here are some ideas for teaching a love of reading in your at-home preschool curriculum:
- Every day read aloud to your children. Up to 20 minutes of work each day.
- Show your child how to handle books “properly” and point to the text so that they can learn to follow or track words as they go from left to right.
- Time and order concepts by reading the narrative again and asking yourself what happened first, next, and last.
- Make sure your youngster can understand a story well enough to be able to relay it to someone else.
- Opening noises. The letter that creates the sound at the start of a word is to be found.
- As you read aloud to your children, encourage them to speak fluently and in whole sentences while distinguishing between fiction and reality.
3. Recognizing shapes, and colors, and enhancing vocabulary
Clearly, play is the only homeschool preschool curriculum for learning shapes, colors, and preschool-appropriate material. Kids will benefit from this and learn in a unique way, developing into well-rounded individuals. Even if you are preschooling at home, the best preschool student technique is a sense of curiosity in learning.
Talk to your youngster about what they notice while you are playing. Through play, your children are discovering their bodily parts, colors, shapes, and even the world’s creatures (as well as the sounds they produce).
- Bring out a bag of stones. Using shapes, paint them. Sort the colored rocks in play according to their sizes, shapes, etc.
- Print out road shape cards and play street. The shapes can be traversed by your child in a car.
- Use shapes to construct. If you don’t have anything else, you can make do with a pack of straws and some pipe cleaners.
- Use a flip book to explore shapes and create a visual kaleidoscope.
- To make shapes and crafts for a mosaic, use salt dough or dried playdough.
- To help your youngster learn about shapes and colors, print vibrant designs onto transparency pages and stack them together.
4. Activities to develop writing skills at home
In addition, your child should at least, be able to recognize the lowercase letters during preschool. However, it would be ideal if they could also learn how to form the letters, at least the ones in their name.
Here are some preschool activities that focus more on play than instruction.
- Now is the ideal moment to observe how to handle a pencil to help young children develop their fine motor abilities.
- Write in a salt tray as practice. Letters can be painted or written by your children. Shake the tray a little bit to erase and then try again. For added excitement, put a light under the table.
- Construct a gel bag. You can give your children tracing practice by placing worksheets underneath the bag. They will see the letters as they write.
- Retrace any highlighted letters that were written. They are able to trace it twice, once with a pencil and once with a marker.
- As your youngsters learn to write, go through sight words with them. They can use a different crayon color each time they trace the text, creating rainbow letters.
5. Activities to develop math skills
Additionally, children should learn how to read written numbers and grasp number correspondence during their preschool years, for example, that three equals the quantity of three items.
They should be taught how to count, identify which piles are larger or smaller, and be able to arrange the piles in order of largest to smallest quantity.
- Practice counting to 20 and identifying groups of up to 10 objects (i.e. a pile of 5 items). Additionally, your child should learn to differentiate between amounts (ex: more v. less).
- With a colorful DIY clock, you can teach your children about time and color theory at the same time. Describe the consistent direction in which clocks travel every minute or hour.
- As you count, draw broad geometric shapes and use chalk to trace from one number to the next. Find mathematical patterns.
- Count from ten to zero each time you approach a red light. Your child will subsequently benefit from this when subtracting.
- Also, use this brilliant do-it-yourself preschool math idea to make a paper tube counting game.
- Take the jelly bean bag out. With jelly bean math, your children can look forward to counting down the minutes with a delectable treat.
- Use Monster Math to practice number correspondence and counting. On the monster with the googly eyes, add the eyeballs.
- Use an engaging math hand to demonstrate finger counting. Consider every possible combination to reach ten.
- Create a math station with numerous little objects for your kids to count.
You can do this! Your toddler can receive education at home. You are capable of creating or using a preschool curriculum at home. Homeschooling for toddlers is doable!
Written by Drexie Nival
