Suddenly we’re all home educators, it seems. Welcome, if this is new to you! You’ll be just fine. There’s no need to 'teach’ your child anything in particular - reading, playing, and living life alongside you is more than enough right now. This is a tricky time for everyone, and when you’re faced with long days balancing the needs of kids with different attention spans and needs, it can feel really hard…especially when you’re extra worried about the world.
Starting on Sunday, I’ll send out a weekly email with an outline of our plans for the week ahead, including topics I plan to cover during formal and informal learning time, and links to a few of the resources we use. If you’d like to sign up, you can here: Join the weekly home ed email!
In the meantime, here’s a brief outline of how we’re structuring our days right now, keeping to our home and garden. Every family is different and how your days flow will be individual to each of you - and it will change over time. I share the rhythm of our days at the moment only to help you see a starting place for crafting your family’s own way of moving through the day. I am certain that in a couple of weeks’ time, our days will have evolved into a new pattern.
Here’s a peek at our current new daily rhythm for life indoors:
Good morning dear Earth! Wake up, morning song, come downstairs.
Coffee, playing, yoga. Grownups check on the state of the world and talk to each other.
Breakfast
Morning time
Outdoors - I call a friend while children play
Upstairs to get dressed. Do chores on rotation, play and listen to audiobook.
Outdoors, open ended art, or sensory play
Lunch. French listening and table based handwork like play dough or wet felting
Quiet independent playtime and supper prep
Teatime
Outdoors or playing dress-up/cafe/immersive play related to a story
Dance, yoga, screen time or calling relatives. The working parent finishes work!
Supper and tablework for A
Bath
Bedtime
We are very lucky to have a garden where we can get outdoors for most of the day. We tend to go out rain or shine. When you’re only just outside your warm home, there’s no need to fear wet weather! You’ll notice that each ‘quiet’ activity is followed with something energetic to help the children get their wiggles out. I can always tell when we’ve stayed doing a quiet activity a bit too long - either things start to be destroyed, misused, or a fight breaks out.
Formal or School-like Learning
Right now we have two formal ‘learning times’ for A, in addition to our teatime reading. Morning time is when we do writing, reading, and maths - usually about one page of maths, six words to copy, and a few pages of a reader. So that Birdie can participate, I have appropriate table-based work for him to do during this time, like sticking stickers, matching colours and shapes, mark making with coloured pencils, or cutting snippets of paper. Most days I also do some letter sound games with Birdie, who likes to point out letters he knows. If you’re looking for activities for your toddler, you might want to check out some of the other things I suggest here: Home Ed with a Toddler.
We read a few books together but once Birdie is done sitting, we all head outside or into the living room. I bring along the books we didn’t get through, and read them (plus whatever else the boys want me to read) throughout the morning.
Sometimes A will finish off a bit more maths or reading while he’s waiting for his lunch. I leave the papers on the table all day so it’s easy for him to dive in if he feels like it. (A note on worksheets: they are absolutely NOT necessary! I never expected to be a workbook using family, but I’ve found that A responds best to this type of learning for some subjects. He was getting very distracted by our beautiful Montessori materials and would forget to complete the work). During lunch we almost always listen to French recordings and review our weekly French vocabulary words.
Our teatimes vary throughout the week, but each one focuses on a different subject. At teatime, we have a snack and sit together to read. Sometimes the books will lead into an activity, like music or art, but often we just read and then head outside again. Often I will read a poem or two related to the subject, plus a few seasonal poems or verses.
This is our daily teatime rotation at the moment:
Monday: Nature study, animals, plants
Tuesday: Music
Wednesday: Visual Art
Thursday: French
Friday: Science
Saturday: Kindness/ethics
Sunday: Geography, history, and culture
During teatime, I make sure that I have a few books at each child’s interest level to include Birdie in what we’re doing. If he wanders off to play while I am reading with A, that’s just fine!
At suppertime, we do a few more maths problems and a bit more reading practice for A, and talk about our science concept for the week. That’s it for formal ‘on paper’ learning - though of course, both boys are constantly learning through the books we read throughout the day, the conversations we have about the world, and their own play.
Reading Aloud and Story Listening
When the boys are playing, I am usually reading aloud, or they are listening to an audio book. A needs extra audio input to stay focused on whatever he’s doing. Our favourites at the moment are Matilda and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl, The Wishing Tree series by Enid Blyton, and the Alfie stories by Shirley Hughes, but there are lots of great stories out there! When I read aloud, I tend to switch between fiction chapter books, history books, or books about science. They absorb more than they appear to! During independent quiet playtime, Birdie gets a break from the extra input and we play together in a quiet room.
You’ll notice that we read a lot of poems. We do! I usually read some poems to the boys during morning time, throughout the day when we’re outside, and during teatime. I love poetry and A is the kind of learner who loves language and verse. I find he has memorised poems after I’ve read them out loud two or three times! Poetry is like candy to him - but much healthier.
Open ended Art and Sensory Play
Kids play in all sorts of different ways, and in our house, we have one child who is happy to play with traditional toys, but another for whom toys just aren’t very fun. Both children are happy making art and exploring with kinetic sand, dough, or water, so we tend to gravitate towards these during joint playtimes.
We keep a big tub of kinetic sand on our shelves, and have a sandpit outdoors. During warmer months, I set up water play outside most days - although I may begin to do this earlier than most years! We also have a well stocked art cart where both boys can freely access watercolour paints, chalk, pencils, crayons, paper, tape, safety scissors and paper punches. There’s also a stack of catalogues, stickers, and other fun things to cut up and stick together. We also have poster paints and wet watercolours that either boy can use in the kitchen, plus spare cardboard that we keep near the recycling. Birdie often chooses to paint on the chalkboard with water and then dry it with a cloth.
I usually invite A to choose some art materials or a type of sensory play medium. He rarely will choose any activity without an invitation, but once he gets started he will create for a long time. Some children need a bit of extra scaffolding to decide what to do next - it’s definitely ok to propose a few options for the next activity!
Outdoors time
We are fortunate to have a large garden at the moment, but even a tiny patch of space outdoors helps shift the energy. If you can provide space for digging, moving sticks or rocks around, a bit of water play, and tending to a few plants, then that’s more than plenty for young children. Even though we have swings and a trampoline, the boys mostly spend their time in the garden moving sticks around, looking at ants, and whacking the fence with sticks.
A Few General Takeaways:
The main thing I consider when trying to balance the needs of different children is whether there is sufficient time for each of them to recharge in the way that works for them, and whether there is an element that speaks to each child in all of our activities. I have one very high energy child who has a short attention span, and one child who is happy to potter about quietly and play with toys for hours at a time - yet who never wants to be left out of a rowdy game, even if he’s tired or overwhelmed. This means that I try to give the energetic child the space to run wild while protecting the quieter child’s desire for slow play at a different point in the day.
We limit screen time in our family under usual circumstances to about 30 minutes twice a week, and we are sticking to this for the time being with the exception of daily yoga or dance classes online, and video chats with family members (although we do have to limit these for one of our kids, because they are often too overstimulating). Our actual time at the table doing things that people might call ‘school’ is probably about 15 minutes, twice a day - although you’ll see that there are constant opportunities for learning throughout the day that are hard to quantify in simple measures.
Anchoring transition points in the day to songs or verse gently helps move children into the next activity. We all have some time ahead of us where we’ll be moving children from room to room throughout the day to get a change of scenery! If you’re new to singing your way through the day (it does come more naturally in time!), you might find my blog post on using song and verse helpful.