Tot Time Fun

When I was home educating just one child, it was relatively easy to do so. I only had to focus on him and we managed to get most of our schoolwork done during his little brother's nap time. However, younger siblings tend to grow, more arrived, and then I even began to babysit for two little girls younger than mine by a couple of years.

Out of necessity I started to put together busy bags for the younger crew. These were activities that once they reached the age of about three, they could pull out to do on their own. Under the age of three, they were able to do most of the activities with direct supervision. All had an educational bent such as learning letters or numbers or working on motor skills. They also served the purpose of keeping little hands and minds occupied while I worked with the older boys. 

I had quite a stash of activities when my youngest was four and I had the extra two little girls. Miss L is pictured above. She was 18 months old and was putting blunt toothpicks into a spice container through the small holes. She loved this and it kept her occupied for quite some time as well as helped her to develop fine motor skills. 

During our school day I would rotate activities as well as "stations." Since I had two small toddlers in a small house, one would sit at the table and work on the activities while the other would play in a playpen with some toys.

My youngest at about age 3 working on his cutting skills.

All my activity bags were stored in a large basket. They were saved for school time only, but you could certainly use them whenever it best suited you. By saving them for a special time, it helped to keep interest in them high.

If you have friends with young children, one really fun thing I did was to participate in an activity bag swap. Twelve is a good number to have in such a swap. Each person picks an activity and creates 12 bags of the same activity. The host then collects all the bags from everyone and swaps it out so everyone gets back 12 different bags (their own plus 11 different ones). I did mine through the mail, but it would be even easier to put something together with a group of local friends.

Below I have listed some of my favorite resources as well as a couple new finds that look great! I am now babysitting a sweet two-year-old. Since we have just started back our school year, I need to come up with some more activities to keep him occupied during our learning time.

*None of these links are affiliate links - just provided for ease of finding info.

• Tot School - lots of ideas for creating tot time activities
• The Toddler's Busy Book - games and activities for children ages 1-1/2 to 3
• The Preschooler's Busy Book - games and activities for children ages 3-6
• Trish Kuffner is the author of the above books and has quite a few more.
• The original Activity Bag - they have lots of different books you can purchase. Each comes with how to put together the bags include printable instructions. They even offer a free coordinator ebook for anyone who plans to put together a swap. 
• A huge Pinterest board of ideas
• Walking By the Way - a great blog with lots of ideas listed 

Lisa is a wife to Bob. They just began their 21st year of marriage. She is also a mom to three boys (ironic, no?). Her oldest will soon be 18 but still has one more year at home. Her middle son is 13 and her youngest is 10. She also stays busy by homeschooling her children and watching a two-year old (a boy of course) full-time as well as other assorted children as the need arises for family and friends. She is very active in her local and state homeschooling community. She is also a very avid reader, enjoys writing, loves dancing at Zumba class, and checking Facebook a little too often. Lisa strives daily to become more Christ-like. She is reminded often of the Lord's mercy and grace and is thankful that He is so gracious to extend to her on a much needed basis. She lives in Maine on her own piece of "no-where land" with her family.

Family Ministry

My advice to you, Dear Daughter, is to choose a family ministry when your children are very small and work, serving the Lord together, at this ministry throughout their childhoods.

Ask the Lord's help in determining where He wants you to serve and bear in mind advice from those who know you about what your gifts and callings are. Then, commit the work to the Lord and follow.

You may have a heart for the homeless and make it your family's mission to provide for them. Maybe you and your husband love to work with children? Perhaps your family ministry is to run children's outreach events together.

It's important to pick something in which your children can be included. Often, churches call parents to important evening meetings, which involve leaving children behind with baby-sitters. This never seemed right to me. Such work can never be as important as your primary ministry - to your children. Families don't need to separate in order to serve God. In fact, when they work together as a team, they demonstrate God's faithfulness to them, as a family, in a unique way.

We chose music, since my husband was a musician and I had been, long ago, a singer. We invested in music for the children, paying for lessons, giving thought and time to their musical development, encouraging a love of musical worship, going to worship music training events and conferences together as a family, eventually serving together on Sunday mornings and at outreach concerts in the evening in our own band, Life-Songs.

Of course, there will be times when the children resist a little; perhaps your teens will need to express themselves in some other way, outside the family ministry. That's okay. The skills and compassion you have helped them develop will be used by God elsewhere.

It's starts like this.

 

Janna, my granddaughter, with her instruments, joining in a family music session.

 and it progresses to something like this...

Team Stewart leading worship on a Sunday morning.

You will be blessed by serving together, Dear Daughter!

Of Peers and Mentors

A peer group is a wonderful thing. Our peers can support us, especially when we are living a lifestyle that is, in some important way, counter-cultural. Perhaps we are Christians, perhaps we have decided  to educate our own children or perhaps we have decided that it is right for our families to raise our children ourselves and not to send them off to long hours in nurseries whilst we work outside the home.

Whatever it is that we are doing differently to the surrounding culture, we are likely to need peer support. Our peers will encourage us, challenge us and help us to feel more 'normal'.

My home educating peers, for example, were the ones with whom I was able to share my frustrations and small triumphs on a weekly basis, as we met up whilst our children were engaged in sports activities together. We met for years as our children grew up together. Occasionally, we still meet up!

Some of my home educating peer group, all now successfully completed that job! Between us, we have children at university or in paid or volunteer employment, enriching their communities. Three of us are also now grandmothers.

We knew that, in many ways, we were pioneers. We knew few mothers from the previous generation of home educators. Firstly, this is because there were actually fewer of them. (Home education has grown enormously since the mid 90s when we began.)

However, also, it is fair to say that the older, experienced generation of mothers had dropped out of the home education scene, moving on to other things, such as caring for elderly parents, or grandchildren, or the need to earn an income, after so many years of financial sacrifice.

Whatever the reason, they tended not to be available to my peer group as mentors.

So, when we were faced with difficulties, like when some of our children were diagnosed with disabilities or when we were concerned about how to help our teenagers sit examinations, in some ways, we had to make the new paths we needed ourselves, metaphorically clearing a route through the jungle, hacking away with our machetes, calling out encouragement to each other along the way.

What we wouldn't have given for older mentors, further along the path, having cleared part of the route for us!

I was very mindful of this lack of mentor mothers during our home education journey. So, when my children had completed their home education and were at college, I deliberately remained involved in the HE community, willing to listen, to help and advise younger mothers, if they wanted me to.

Few did. In fact, it was almost as if mothers like myself were not wanted at all. In certain places, my presence was considered suspicious. I was, apparently, no longer a home educator and, so, no longer welcome. The irony being that some of these very groups, which people now consider a vital lifeline of peer support, I actually set up myself, as a pioneer.

'The teaching of the wise is a fountain of life,
that one may turn away from the snares of death.' Proverbs 13:14 (ESV)

I am noticing that most women don't seem to want mentor mothers around. Let's put that another way: when women get to a particular stage in life, they are not as welcome as they once were.

Perhaps it's our fault. Perhaps the way that we try to share our experience and wisdom is too overbearing or clumsy. Perhaps, though, experience and the wisdom acquired by painful pioneering is not recognised as valuable. Perhaps it's simply that older women themselves are just not valued.

If God blesses you, Dear Daughter, with a long life, you will one day stand where I stand now. How do you wish to be seen, as an older woman? How do you view the older women around you?

In the home education community, I would ask younger women, even if you do not feel the need for a mentor mother, do not despise the women who walked that path you are walking down.

Some of us sacrificed a great deal to clear it for you.

Mimi is a wife to Jamie, mother to two grown up children, a mother-in-law and a grandmother to a darling little grand-daughter. She home-educated her children and now teaches exam subjects to groups of home-educated children. She's a Worship Leader in her church and has a passion for helping women raise children to adulthood with a strong faith in the Lord Jesus. 

Creative Curriculum

As another school year is about to begin, you might already have your new books and plans all ready. Or, you may still be trying to figure out what you are going to use. The curriculum fairs and catalogs are full of interesting, exciting and often expensive packages and text books all ready for you to use. 

There were years that we bought the big box of everything. We loved the books and it was nice to have everything all planned out for us. There were many years that we bought an eclectic mix of curriculum from our favorite suppliers and authors. But there were a few lean years where we couldn't afford the shiny new books. And those ended up being some of our funnest years of schooling. 

When money is tight, you need to get creative and resourceful in your planning. The library is very helpful for this. Sometimes you may be able to borrow from other homeschoolers. We once borrowed an entire set of Sonlight books for a year, other years we have just borrowed a subject or two. 

One of our favorite treasures is a set of American Adventure historical fiction books that we discovered in a tub of books that we picked up for free from the online Freecycle list. We created our own history curriculum from these books and the kids loved it! The books follow an extended family from the days as religious refugees/pilgrims in the Old Country to their voyage to America and the on through history until the mid 20th Century.

 I would read the books aloud to the kids.  While they were fiction, they included a lot of historical facts. We would expand upon the information that we picked up from these books by finding non fiction books, videos and other resources at the library to go deeper into the various subjects that we were learning about. If I could tie in a field trip we would do that as well. The kids enjoyed the stories and the history, science and geography they were learning was all the more interesting because they could relate to it more as they saw it through the eyes of the fictional family that was interacting with very real historical figures. 

I spent next to nothing on history and science for those two years, but we learned so much and had so much fun learning it. So, be creative and find ways to work within your means and make facts come alive. Expensive does not mean better.  

Some good resources to use for frugal schooling are the library, internet and local historical or science museums and educational groups. 

You might also want to check out these books. Homeschooling Your Child For Free and The Complete Home Learning Source Book. 

Jen

Intentional Education

When my oldest child was just three years old, my husband asked me if I would consider home schooling her. Since my only exposure to home schooling up to that point was a dear friend who had transformed her dining room into a one room school house, complete with an American Flag hanging from the wall and pull-down maps hung from the ceiling, I laughed at my husband and began the arduous process of looking for a  pre-school for my young, impressionable daughter before she turned four and all the good spots were gone.

This, dear daughter, is not the way to go about making a good decision about how best to educate your children. Thankfully, the Lord intervened in my heart and put godly, wise women in my path to help me make a more informed decision. This, I think is the most important thing, praying and seeking the Lord and godly wisdom.

"Without consultation, plans are frustrated, but with many counselors, they succeed." (Proverbs 15:22)

So many people in my life in those early years were completely taken aback by our decision to keep our children out of an institutional school setting and educate them in our home. Many of them freely admitted that it was just what you did, put your children in the public school. What I slowly came to realize was that many of them had not given this much thought. I want to encourage you to consider that God may be calling you to a different decision, to a narrower path, to a path that may not be as easy but will ultimately be one of the most rewarding things you've ever done. Home schooling is not for everyone. But if it is for you, it will be one of the most rewarding things you've ever done.

And, I would also like to point out that it isn't necessary to recreate a school room in your home. Once I discovered that I could fashion my home school in a way that best fit our family, I found myself getting excited about doing so. I also read "Better Late than Early" by Raymond and Dorothy Moore and became convinced that young children belonged at home with their parents and siblings in those early years. Here they would have the opportunity to develop their identities apart from their peers, continue to bond with their family of origin and find out who they were as part of that family. And they would have plenty of time to play, which is a benchmark of childhood. In their book, Better Late than Early, Raymond and Dorothy Moore talk about the importance of play as an overall part of the learning process for young children. They also point out numerous studies showing that young children who learn to read as late as age 9 catch up to their same-age peers within a few short months of those who learned to read as early as 4 years of age.

As I read wonderful books with my children when they were small and then watched them go outside to play and act out what they had learned, it became so apparent that this was how they were internalizing what they had heard. They didn't need tests and worksheets, they needed to run, play and act out what they'd learned.



Of course, as they got older, this type of play became less and less, but the benefits of home schooling continued and we just kept going until they graduated high school.

The bottom line, dear daughter, is that you have options. I pray that you will not just follow the crowd, but make a prayerful, intentional decision about what is best for your family and what God is calling you to. If you do these things, you will indeed be blessed.

Laura

Educating Little Ones

Children need a language-rich environment in order to develop intellectually.

Study after study has shown this. If you talk to your baby and toddler directly, even before you think they understand you fully, they will develop a winder vocabulary, both spoken and understood, earlier and, with that, they'll be able to process ideas in a more sophisticated way, as well as communicate and interact with the world better. These benefits are long-lasting, too.

It's not just about the language they overhear, or plonking them in front of the tv (I know...we all did it), it's important to stress. You might feel a bit of a twerp sitting opposite your 12 month old baby and talking about the day, or their clothes or toys, directly, or reading them books on your lap, but it's the directness and richness of the vocabulary used which is vital.

Sadly, it's children from families with lower socioeconomic status that tend to speak less often, and use fewer words, to their children. Recent research found that by the age of 2 years, English-learning children from lower-SES families were already 6 months behind same-age children from higher-SES families in vocabulary and speech processing skills that are crucial for language learning.

You can do this, Dear Daughter.

I hope that you won't get the impression that this blog is about what you *should* do, but about what you *could* do. And you could provide some linguistic nutrition for your child. :-)

If you want to read some research about this, then you can click on this link.

Mimi is a wife to Jamie, mother to two grown up children, a mother-in-law and a grandmother to a darling little grand-daughter. She home-educated her children and now teaches exam subjects to groups of home-educated children. She's a Worship Leader in her church and has a passion for helping women raise children to adulthood with a strong faith in the Lord Jesus.

Wednesday: Educating Ourselves

Educating Ourselves

When you begin a new job, you are usually trained to be competent in it. A period is set aside during which you are taught and given the support, skills and resources to reach a good standard of work. You are often mentored by a more experienced worker for a while.

This does not happen when we first get married and/or have a our first baby. :-)

There is an assumption that our mothers would have taught us everything we need to know, which may or may not be true, and there is also an assumption that we will instinctively know how to mother a baby. In my experience, neither were true and, so, I initiated a serious self-education campaign!

Books and friends were my first recourse when I started out. Later, the internet became a source of much useful (and much useless!) information. Peer-to-Peer support can be valuable, but don't feel you need to re-invent the wheel in order to prove you are capable; other, older women have gone ahead of you and many are more than happy to offer their help or suggestions. That's what this blog is all about.

Young Housewife, Oil on canvas, by Alexey Tyranov (1801-1859). The Russian Museum, St. Petersburg

It's not a matter of failing if you need to ask for help. In fact, it's the first step in being successful at something. We aren't all born housekeepers, home-creators or mothers. It's heartening to know that it is possible to learn 'on the job'.

To learn is to grow, dear Daughter, and it's a life-long process.

Mimi is a wife to Jamie, mother to two grown up children, a mother-in-law and a grandmother to a darling little grand-daughter. She home-educated her children and now teaches exam subjects to groups of home-educated children. She's a Worship Leader in her church and has a passion for helping women raise children to adulthood with a strong faith in the Lord Jesus.