Читать книгу Homeschooling For Dummies - Jennifer Kaufeld - Страница 74

If you have more than one child, you know how much younger siblings pick up from their older counterparts. Much of it, thankfully, is even positive! Wonder what you can teach your first toddling homeschooler? You’re probably doing just fine already.

Toddlers learn best as they bounce around their world. Exploring life, getting into the mud after a rain, hiding stuffed animals in your best plants, and crashing for a nap after a hard morning’s play — these are the things toddlers do best. They play hard, learn a great deal, and generally sleep pretty well (as long as you’re willing to scoot over in your bed in the wee morning hours once in a while).

Incorporating your toddler into your day provides some of the best pre-homeschooling training she could receive. Talking to a little person increases her vocabulary when she’s ready to use it. Letting a toddler watch you spread peanut butter onto crackers or pour the daily apple juice shows him how the world works. You teach things like beginning cause and effect (what happens to the empty glass when we tip the apple juice jar over it?) simply by living through your day.

Here are some simple ways to incorporate learning into your toddler’s day:

 Announce the colors of clothing and objects as you come across them. Not too many months will pass before your toddler knows the difference between the red jacket and the blue one.

 Talk about clothing as you dress your toddler. Snapping, tying, buttoning, and Velcro may be old hat to you, but to your toddler it’s a whole new fastener-filled world out there.

 Listen to different styles of music and talk about them with your toddler. While discussing musical motifs is probably more than your toddler has in mind, saying something like “Let’s listen to some Beethoven,” “Want to hear some Russian folk music?” or “How about some Fleetwood Mac?” fits right into the flow of things.

 Talk about the people who come to your house regularly. “Here’s the mail carrier!” not only identifies that person who brings such cool stuff on a daily basis, but it also gives your toddler language that helps her identify that part of her day. By the time my children were preschoolers, they could identify UPS, FedEx, DHL, and U.S. Postal carriers on sight simply because they came to our house nearly every day.

 If you know a second language, begin identifying objects in both languages. The younger a child learns a second (or third) language, the easier it is for her to assimilate that tongue. Of course, teaching a toddler or preschooler a second language guarantees some interesting sentences because young children use whichever word they think of first regardless of the language it comes from.