If you are looking for a perfect homeschool timeline and curriculum, you won’t find it here. At this age, children learn best through play. However, what we are doing at this time is creating a guide, of sorts, that helps steer us in some day-to-day activities. This guide/routine will grow to include more as E and V do.
While we breakfast and enjoy our ‘coffee,’ we go over what we are doing for the day. I found the perfect planner! We use it now to keep track of themes, activities, subjects, and notes from observation. While it fits our current needs, it will also be ideal for our future homeschooling needs too.
Mornings are when we do our day-to-day routine like cleaning and poetry readings. We also read about the artists, art style, music, etc that we will be focusing on that day. We often reserve our hands-on crafts for after nap so I can have everything set up for when they awaken. This prevents them from being influenced by what I’m doing and allows me to prepare without interference–like how I rotate shelf materials while they aren’t around.
Mondays, we do music and Tuesdays, crafts. Does this mean that from 3-5 on their prospective days we work on these subjects? Not at all. When the girls wake up from their nap, I’ll often have materials laid out for the subject we are focusing on that day. If they show interest, we continue with what I had planned. If they don’t show interest, we go about our day following their lead, which is usually working with traditional Montessori materials in the homeschool area downstairs or language-related work.
The time we spend in the homeschool area varies. Also, the homeschool area is a much different environment than the upstairs. Again, with them being so young this is just about setting a routine. My goal is a half-hour. Yup, that’s it. We often go over that amount but haven’t spent more than two hours in the homeschool area and that included read many of the books in the downstairs bookcase. I set a goal that is doable for young toddlers. If someone wants to head up a bit earlier, I will redirect to some work that they often find interesting or offer a book–E and V have NEVER turned down a reading session, haha.
An example of Monday: The Monday after Eddie Van Halen’s passing, we read about Van Halen and listened to a record with David Lee Roth and a few tracks with Sammy Hagar. They play some instruments to the beat of the songs. We always read “We’re Going on a Bear Hunt,” when they start to show less interest in their instruments, to wrap up. Sometimes they drum along and sometimes they are already off, working on something else.
As with most of our homeschool activities, our art/crafts are inspired by what we have read about, like pointillism. After their nap, we then create our own pieces using dot art markers that I have prepared for them.
There have been weeks in a row where the craft invitations have been ignored. But then, they’ll show interest in something I am working on (usually painting), some other time, and wish to participate. I then try to set up something similar to what I’m doing.
We don’t reserve language or other topics for specific days. We work on subjects like that daily, through everyday materials because practice, practice, practice. And, honestly, as they always have access to some musical instruments and are always welcome to participate in art, we don’t just reserve those for Monday or Tuesday, I just tend to showcase those subjects then. You won’t find us saying something along the lines of, “Oh, that’s for Wednesday…etc.” If they bring us an instrument, we play! If they act like they want more, we go and grab other ones.
We are all about going with the flow because if we follow their interests, they are more likely going to be excited to learn. They are second-generation homeschool/unschoolers. This worked for me and I hope that it, or some variant, will work well for them.
That’s a look at how we are currently “homeschooling” E and V at 22-months old. Are you homeschooling your little one or plan to?
This post contains affiliate links at no extra cost to you.
.
.
.
