There’s been so much emphasis recently on how school-age kids are learning during the pandemic, and it’s easy to overlook the little ones. For families like ours who have chosen to home educate from the beginning, providing an education doesn’t start at compulsory school age. Everyone in the family is included in learning, from the youngest member right up to us adults, who are also always learning.
Birdie’s now 2 and three quarters - suddenly! - and since he was about two and a half I’ve been more intentional in considering his education alongside A’s. As he edges into the first plane of development, that phase from 3-6 years that Maria Montessori described as the ‘absorbent mind’ stage, I see Birdie amassing information about his world at an incredible rate. He wants to know the names for everything, preferably in French as well as English. He wants to group and categorise, make patterns, and refine his senses. He wants to be a useful and self-sufficient member of our household.
We’re not a strict Montessori family, although I am still very inspired by Montessori’s work and her philosophy is really at the heart of my approach to home education with young children. I no longer try to replicate classroom shelves in our home - I’m not sure that those type of layouts are ideal without a community of children to model their use and to collaborate with. Birdie doesn’t have his own set of work shelves, but I do prepare a few discrete, Montessori-style activities each week to present to him. These activities are usually literacy and numeracy focused. He is invited to participate in practical life activities like baking, cleaning, gardening, and caring for himself throughout the day in an organic way. As a younger sibling, he benefits from a household and a family rhythm that is centred around child-led learning, and he’s a happy participant to the best of his ability in the art, music, and science activities that we do together.
Here’s a peek at what we’re doing at 2.5-3 years old in our Montessori-inspired (but very philosophically eclectic) home.
Reading:
Birdie participates in some - and some days all - of our morning reading time, where I read poems, topical books, seasonal stories, and our read-aloud book. He has two bookshelves in the living room that I rotate every week or so. One has general fiction and nonfiction books that are appropriate for a younger child, plus a few books that both children will enjoy hearing read aloud. His other shelf is French books. He has had a strong interest in French for over a year now and chooses to be read books in French throughout the day. He is exposed to much more fantasy than A was at this age, but doesn’t seem to be confused about story creatures (Moomins, ghosts, talking cats) being real.
I also invite Birdie to participate in our read-aloud time, where I read from a chapter book. He often plays with trains while I read, but later will act out what I’ve read. Sometimes he will choose to just sit and listen. It’s easy to underestimate a toddler’s interest in long stories or in books without pictures, but many young children love longer stories and a child approaching 3 will be able to remember what was read the previous day and follow the plotline of a lengthy story. Birdie sometimes also chooses to listen to audiobooks while he plays. His favourites right now are recordings of Mog the Cat stories by Judith Kerr, Alfie stories by Shirley Hughes, and Gobbolino the Witch’s Cat from our recordings of the 1990s Storyteller magazine.
Maths:
Maths is one area where I do provide more structured invitations. This age is perfect for working on subitization - the skill of recognizing quantity on sight - and correspondence between numerals and objects. Each week I set up a tray with number cards and sets of objects as a starting point for a number and quantity matching game, and invite Birdie to do a number game with me during our afternoon quiet time. He enjoys fetching specific numbers of blocks or cars, or returning a specific number back to the container. We also read the Baan Dek Montessori Numbers book and trace number shapes with his fingers to help with numeral and object correlation. These activities can be done without buying any specific materials - writing numbers clearly on cards and matching these to sets of blocks, soft toys, or cars is just as effective as using materials that are purpose-made.
Shapes and pattern recognition games happen more organically, since both boys have a strong interest in magnetic tile play. Magnetic tiles are great for introducing language about simple shapes and seeing firsthand how shapes interact to form other shapes. They’re also wonderful for laying out simple shape or colour patterns that a toddler can continue.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll introduce a DIY spindle box to expand on our numeral/quantity correspondence work.
Language:
Birdie is on the cusp of being very interested in letters. He points out letters he knows - only a handful right now - and pretends to sound out words, which shows that he has an understanding that the symbols have a relationship with sounds and a meaning that can be deciphered. Language is another area where I am more intentional in creating toddler-specific work.
Each week, I select one of our sandpaper letters and create a letter tray to explore together during afternoon quiet time. The tray will also has one letter from our movable alphabet and a few objects that start with that letter sound. Together we will say the letter sound, trace it, look at the objects, and see what else we can find in the room that starts with that sound. These games are very short - just a few minutes. I supplement this with sensory activities like marking the letter into play dough, or drawing the letter on the chalkboard and inviting Birdie to paint over it with water.
In the next few weeks, I’ll begin to add a salt letter tracing tray to our language activities, and will add in some games to isolate sounds at the ends of words.
Many children of this age adore learning the very specific names of things they are interested in. Nonfiction books with clear drawings or photographs that have well-labeled images are perfect for introducing the names of body parts, animals, plants, and other things that are important to your child. I haven’t prepared any nomenclature cards yet for Birdie, but we have a range of books that give detailed names of objects and parts of objects that he enjoys reading - especially ones about trains and tractors.
The Arts and Culture/Society:
In our family rhythm, we have times in our week set aside for music games and music appreciation, studying visual art, and doing creative movement. Birdie is included in all of these activities and I try to provide him with an age-appropriate way of engaging with the idea. He is very enthusiastic about colouring along with us when we listen to our Playful Piano music selection for the week, and usually contributes his own observation about the music when asked. The second movement of Vivaldi’s winter, in Birdie’s opinion, is a sad song, where Vivaldi was ‘thinking about his dummies.’ The struggle of growing up!
We’ve been unable to attend Colourstrings music classes because of the pandemic, but I play a few of the tunes and games that focus on pentatonic notes and simple rhythms. We play clapping games all together in a call-and-response fashion, and dance in time to different tempos of music. I have to admit that Birdie hasn’t had as rich of a musical education at this age as A did, but his interests are different and he seems quite reluctant to engage in any musical games I lead. Follow the child! He has other interests.
We read about artists all together and Birdie is given the same invitation to create art that A is - usually painting or drawing as we try to experience a bit of how the artist thought about the world. With any of these activities, I expect that his attention span will be short - but the surprising thing about having a toddler alongside a young child with attention challenges is that I usually vastly underestimate his ability to concentrate! In addition to our set art history/art making times, Birdie is able to help himself to anything on our art cart, including water painting on the Buddha board, drawing, cutting snips of paper, glueing with glue sticks, stickers, and Stockmar watercolours in a tin. I do limit free access to crayons and liquid watercolours because we are currently renting a house with white walls and light coloured carpeting, but these are visible on a high shelf and he is able to use these under supervision whenever he asks. Even at 5.5, A has the same rule with these materials.
Birdie is on the young side for Growing Towards Justice but exposing him to ideas about compassion, kindness and equity from a very young age happens through reading and talking. Children notice differences in skin colour and gender presentation from a very early age, and start absorbing cultural biases immediately. The main work we do with Birdie in this area is simply modelling inclusive language and behaviour alongside reading a wide range of books with different main characters. There’s much more inspiration and guidance in my set of monthly reading and activity guides for this area.
Practical Life:
For the 2.5-3 year old, practical life activities are central to their day and to their development as an independent person. I don’t create any specific practical life trays for Birdie, like pouring or sorting into containers. Instead he is very involved in the life of the family, and I offer him opportunities throughout the day to refine those skills in real, useful ways. He helps to load and unload the dishwasher, put away his clean laundry, pour drinks for the family from a small glass pitcher, cut up snacks for a shared snack plate, and bake whatever treat we’re having for teatime. Over the past few weeks, Birdie’s become an independent dresser and really has a sense of pride knowing that he doesn’t usually need help to manipulate his clothing. Like A, he chooses what he wants to wear each day and has strong preferences on the types of things he feels like wearing.
Birdie also gets a fair amount of practical life skill development in his play, when he uses screwdrivers and spanners to assemble and disassemble Meccano Jr objects. He does have a small screw board but unsurprisingly this is a difficult work to keep in one piece - it’s much more fun to test out the screwdriver around the house. He also has threading beads that he sometimes chooses to use, but since they are ‘toddler-safe’ they aren’t much of a challenge. I need to replace them with smaller ones, but I still do have a worry about him putting some small objects in his mouth.
In the next few weeks I’ll be adding in some sewing and handwork projects for all of us, and I’ll be creating some special lacing and weaving projects just for Birdie.
Nature study:
Being in nature - even if that’s just our back garden - is important to our family. I believe that the best way for children to love to learn our planet is to love nature and have a personal relationship with plants, animals, and the land. We have a few nature study themes each month to help anchor us in the seasons, but our most important nature study is what happens organically when we get outdoors. For a toddler, the experience of having unstructured time in nature to explore their surroundings and test their physical abilities is invaluable. There is so much that can be learned by feeling moss growing along a fallen tree trunk or seeing a bird find its breakfast.
Unstructured play:
Most of Birdie’s day is spent playing. He adores his train set and cars, magnetic tiles, lego, and small world play with Maileg mice and wooden animals. He rides his balance bike and scooter (often in the house!), builds bus shelters and sees what will lift with his crane truck. This is the most important learning a child this age can do. Imaginative, self-directed play is the most important work for a child of this age - and for older children as well! Play is never ‘just’ play. It is essential - the work of the child! - and is the space where information is integrated.