I put together my homeschool plan in a single afternoon. I was inspired, apparently. But I’ve been reading and thinking about how I want to do homeschooling since before Charlie was born. There are several different influences and thoughts that have come together to affect how I made our first homeschool plan.

Influencing Ideas

Tot School

A few years ago I came across the site 1+1+1=1. This site created by a homeschooling mom has a ton of stuff on it, but one of the things she is best known for is “Tot School.” She explains it in more detail on her site, but the basic idea is to spend some intentional one on one time with your young children exposing them to learning concepts through play. You can really go all out with these ideas and can find a lot of resources and ideas on her site, but the key idea for me was exposure. If I am focusing on exposing Charlie to different concepts and ideas rather than making him learn anything to a particular level of mastery it takes a lot of the pressure off and helps me remember to just keep it fun. If he’s not in the mood or doesn’t seem to catch on, I can at least know that he’s seen something new and maybe been introduced to some new vocabulary. Then the next time I expose him to that idea he’ll be a bit more familiar with it and may be able to take it farther. I think this is a great idea to keep in mind when “teaching” young children.

Journaling

Journaling sounds like a crazy thing to do with a two year old. I never would have considered it if I had not run across this post about how a preschool teacher uses journals with her three year old class. I realized that a journal doesn’t have to be about writing prompts, but really can be any way to record thoughts. I loved her examples of drawing shapes in the journal for the kids to interact with and how the kids will dictate to her what their drawings are about. I started seeing all kinds of ways a journal could be useful in our beginning homeschool endeavors. First of all, it would give me a place to have Charlie do paper based activities. Originally my plan was to just get out sheets of paper as needed, but I could see that quickly becoming messy and hard to organize. A journal is nice and contained. I also realized that it could be a valuable way to keep records. Simply by hanging on to the journal I’ll be able to go back and see what Charlie has learned and how he’s improved. I can also make quick notes on a page if there’s anything specific I want to remember about a particular day of school. The journal also gets back to the idea of exposure. I can write words or short sentences in the journal to show Charlie what writing is like. Someday he’ll be ready to do it too.

 The first journal page.

Charlotte Mason

If you spend much time reading around the homeschooling circles, you’ll probably hear about Charlotte Mason. She was an educator in England many years ago and she wrote several volumes of books on her educational methods and philosophy. I haven’t read any of her actual books, but I’ve read summaries and a lot of her ideas have really resonated with me. Some of the things that feel most applicable right now are her focus on nature studies and the arts (basically, she thinks those things are important) and the recommendation to keep lessons short. We’ll definitely be incorporating both of those ideas in our homeschool.

Life Skills

My own personal goals for our homeschool involve a lot of practical life skills. I want my kids to know how to cook and clean and contribute to general family life. I plan to use school time as an opportunity to work on some of those skills a bit more intentionally.

The Plan

So I know you’re just dying to find out what exactly I plan to do with this ambitious school time of ours. So here you go.

Structure

I aim to plan for three months at a time. I’m only planning to do activities a 2-3 times a week and many activities will be repeated over the course of those 3 months. This keeps the planning job much more manageable. I figure kids don’t seem to mind repetition as much as adults do and are more likely to learn when they are doing activities that feel familiar to them. So as long as an activity is holding Charlie’s interest, I’m not going to stress about needing to find a new way to do things.

I also plan to only focus on just a few “Big Ideas” during the 3 month time period. Planning every three months means it will change with the seasons, so seasonal themes will always be incorporated. For our first three months the other big ideas will include “What Babies Need” and “Shapes.”

Activities

Calendar Time

Every day we spend a few minutes looking at the calendar. We use a magnet that says “TODAY” and move it to the correct day of the week. I tell him what day of the week it is, and we look ahead to any interesting events that are coming up. Then I have Charlie look out the window to decide what kind of weather we are having and find the appropriate magnet to describe it. So far every day has been sunny, but we have magnets for cloudy, rainy, and snowy as well. I hope through this activity to introduce a lot of vocabulary and help him develop his sense of time.

Fall Theme

There are lots of fun crafts out there that center on the theme of fall. I plan to incorporate a few of those along with some nature walks, leaf collections, a trip to the apple orchard and pumpkin patch, and maybe an attempt at making apple pie or cobbler together.

What Babies Need Theme

This is our “Life Skill” theme for the season, obviously chosen to try to help Charlie prepare for the new baby. We’ll do a lot of role playing with his baby doll, hopefully find some good books about new babies at the library, and I plan to come up with a sorting game involving things that are good for babies (like mama, milk, and sleep) and things that are bad for babies (like playing rough, small choking-hazard sized objects, and messy diapers).

Shapes Theme

I have lots of fun ideas to learn about different shapes, using both fine and gross motor skills. There will be tracing, sorting, identifying, and creating using different shapes.

A shape sorting activity – in his journal!

Christmas

Our three month time frame includes the Christmas season, so once December hits we’ll be doing our Advent Activity Calendar again. I’ll keep a lot of the activities the same, but add in a few new ones now that Charlie is a little older.

Nursery Rhymes and Speech

Charlie has been in speech therapy for about 6 months now and has made great progress, but he still has a ways to go. With all of our other themes I plan to introduce new vocabulary and encourage Charlie to try to say new words. I also want to pick out just a few Nursery Rhymes to say together during each new season. One of his speech goals is to speak more fluidly (right now he has a definite break as he thinks of each word that comes next) and speech therapist told us that any sort of rhythmic or repetitive books, rhymes, or songs should help with that goal. We plan to incorporate those into school time, as well as any other practice activities the speech therapist leaves with us.

Whew! That felt like a lot of words right there. But I think for the next three months that will give us just enough material to get some variety in our days while still getting to spend a good amount of time in each theme. Our first couple of days of school have been fun for both of us and I’m excited about our plans! I promise I’ll share some more specific activities and pictures of what we are doing soon.