How to structure the day- Need inspiration!

[Skylark]

Great great ideas, Isabeau ! K2U!

[ZaJa]

Thanks for sharing Isabeau - that's a pretty organized teaching and learning. Keep up the good work!

[Isabeau]

Thanks!  I like having the general structure to keep our days full with plenty of fun activities.  i'm not super creative with thinking up fun activities to do just on the spot which is why it seems so planned.  I want to do activities with him, and play with him (i'm a SAHM!) and give him my attention throughout the day, but if I don't plan, we end up playing trains, trucks or cars, and I just have no idea how to play those!  We're there for five minutes before i'm like "uhhh, okay, i'm out of material here, what do I do next?!?" and my husband laughs because he could play those things all day long and still keep it interesting.

We also end up skipping days regularly -- like this morning we're going to the park, so i'll just do an abridged version of the activities -- usually we'll focus on letters and words, and leave out the geography and computer stuff.  The reading, we do throughout the day anyway (maybe not the specific theme books, but whatever) so I leave that off too if we're going out. 

[Tanikit]

I work mornings but my husband is at home with our daughter then. This is an average day (I work every second weekend but have Friday off then so we have to change our schedule a fair amount)

Breakfast where we chat about what is going to happen that day or ask Laurana what she'd like to do. We occassionally introduce new vocabulary then, but usually this is just in the midst of normal converstaion.
I go off to work and Laurana rides out the gate in the car and says goodbye.
My husband gets her dressed and sorts hmself out while she plays alone I imagine.
My husband does an activity with her - we originally did the alphabet and had a word for each letter of the alphabet where he taught her whatever he felt like about that thing (eg igloos or cats or vacuum cleaners) and there is usually a colouring page to do or an activity (they do a lot of gross motor activities)
Tea time they usually eat outside with the dogs and play games running around in the garden
More quiet time - maybe they watch some TV or read books or do Little Reader and possibly also reading eggs (although we need to switch back to starfall now)
They wait in the front garden playing games til I come home - today he had taken out the rocking horse for her to rock on in the garden
Lunch time and discussion about what she did that morning
Nap time - I read her a book or we play games with her toys before she goes to sleep
Quiet time after she has woken up - maybe she draws or plays with blocks or other toys - this is usually when we do counting and other vocab exercises within the normal play - we may also paint or do other crafty things
Little Reader and Starfall/Reading eggs
Supper time - I make supper while she either plays on the floor near me (usually chatting to a whole host of her toys and playing make believe with them) or my husband plays rowdy games with her which involve racing around the house or jumping and dancing
Clean up time - we clear the rooms in a 10 minute clean up which Laurana participates in - she must take a few toys back to her own room
Bath time - a lot of learning happens in the bath - we read books to her and there is a lot of imaginative play - I try to take a few different things in there and just go with the flow - she'll be interested in floating and sinking one day and maybe trying to cook pretend fruit the next day - we just try to expand on it so she gets access to many things
Depending how tired she is we may do more quiet play - drawing, reading books to her, fine motor activities
Discuss the day and tomorrow
Prayers and bed

Thats about it. She only has concentration for about a 5minute planned activity anyway so we have to go with the flow and I find leaving her when she is engrossed is better with the occassional comment to enable her to learn more. I do look up a lot of activities on the internet and we try a few each week too - like planting beans or digging dinosaurs out of jelly - its more to stimulate my husband and me than her but if we are enjoying it then she'll love learning more. We do also take her out a few times a week too and she goes to a toddler group once a week - getting out certainly helps - there is a lot they can learn in a grocery store, at the park, at the library and so on.

[khatty]

Tanikit - What are reading eggs?  I use starfall but I have never heard of reading eggs.  Thx.

[hypatia]

Isabeau and Tanikit, that is great. Thank you so much for taking the time to give us so much detail.
Your children are a bit older than mine I think (closer to 2 than 1?) If you do remember, was were you doing then?

I do talk to my daugter a lot as she is always on the move. If we play 'letters' for example (let's say i hand over to her a big A) and I say, 'Can you take the letter A please', 'that the letter A' or whatever, she'll take it and drop it the next second to dig dirt out of a pot plant.
We call her the little monkey as she's constantly imitating us. So even while she walks around i'll do some animal sounds and she'll try to repeat, she 'reads' when i do, helps with her small broom, brushes her hair, tries to put her feet in my shoes etc.
So most of my teaching is simply talking to her, and involving her in everything I do.

Is 'reading eggs' a DVD program?

Oh, by the way, anyone interested in selling me some second hand products such as 'Wink to learn' mandarin (or some other DVD in Mandarin, aside from Little Pim), and WBCR? I've put an ad up but haven't have much luck yet :-)

[Isabeau]

Hi!  Yeah, my eldest son is older -- he's three.  My second son is 8 months.  He sits and watches most of what we do, between his naps.

As for what I did when my eldest son was younger:
We did a LOT of baby sign language.  A lot of it. I think that he probably knew around 200 signs. I know Doman suggests that it might not be worth it but I disagree WHOLE heartedly.  It was fantastic.  Amazing.  Wonderful, phenomenal.  And SO easy to teach.

I know we started geography really young with him, around the time he was one.  We'd always had the map up on the wall, down low beside his play table.  We started with the bigger countries -- Canada, China, Russia and Brazil, I think, and started getting progressively smaller.

We also did swimming lessons.

I honestly can't remember what else, other than a lot of reading to him, a lot of breastfeeding (that baby was crazy for breastfeeding), he was also generally a diaperless baby at home (Elimination Communication), and a lot of singing and music stuff.  I hadn't heard of Doman or any of these theories yet, when my three year old was born.  Drats!

[ZaJa]

Hi hypatia and khatty,

You may check out reading eggs at www.readingeggs.com. The website says that ABC Reading Eggs helps ages 4-7 learn to read while having fun. It is a unique online world where children learn to read. It supports each child’s learning by offering individual, one-on-one lessons that allow children to progress at their own rate.

Heard good things about it but I have yet to explore it myself. Do check it out!

[Tanikit]

www.readingeggs.com is a program that teaches phonics. My daughter at 23 months could manage it though she cannot yet move the mouse herself - I just asked her to point and did it for her. Its VERY testing based so mostly I just read it to her and asked her only a few and its VERY repetitive. Nonetheless my daughter loved it and still asks for it every day - we have finished the trial part and I am loathed to pay for it right now as she is perhaps a little too young for the full programme so I am going back to starfall for now.

At a year we did drawing with Laurana allowing her to scribble, we also did paint with her (it was more messy than it is now) I swam with her a fair amount and took her for walks in the garden and we did flashcards stuck to the wall. She was already running by 12,5 months so we could do a lot of physical activities with her. We let her play with knob puzzles and talked a lot and took her for walks in her pram telling her what she was seeing and letting her out to walk for short periods.

We were living in a large overgrown garden at the time so also spent a lot of time pulling up weeds which Laurana did enjoy pulling up and that gave us a lot of time to teach her about plants and growth and roots and so on while she slid down the rather muddy hill as if it was a slide.

Basically we used whatever we had and just kept talking and telling her things. If she seemed interested and I didn't know enough I'd go and look up on an internet site to find out things you could tell her age group and slightly older kids too. It was at 13-14 months that she seemed to have the most fun in grocery stores putting things into our basket and generally exploring everything. We also took her to the beach and to play parks for outings as we were living at the sea then.

[Cat]

I have 2 kids..And I wish i had done half of what you had written

[awantika]

hello    see i can understand your problem. one thing i must tell u that pls dont force your baby to do a thing with out his willingness . i can say that if u r at home then try to do thing onthe same time each day .for ex when he wakes up  sing a beutiful prayer to him like thank god for one more day be happy or something like that but do it each day .      also fix his time for bathing ,eating etc .catch that tme ech day for that particular activity. now when he will get use to of  the time table ,then add a new teaching activity each day like start with stimulation cards . also dont stick to bookish knowledge  .try to pick lively objects ex. when u bring vegitables n fruits give them to him for playing tell him that " oh this is an apple it is of red color , it is sweet in taste'. '" this is an orange , it is of orange color , l. this is a potato it is vegitable............. like that . try to start with practical things .when he will know all the fruits .then jump to a book of fruits show him with the spellings .    also talk to him continuosly ,whatever activity u r doing explain him . for ex.if ur opening ur freeze (refigrator) tell him it keep things cool, n give him an ice cube.  inthis way he will start taking interest in learning . butmake sure u r following routine

[hypatia]

Hi all
Am a bit disapointed as i wrote a lenghthy answer to many of your comments yesterday, and when i checked today it wasn't there. i'll be answering by tomorrow when i have a little more time. 

[nhockaday]

Yes, it seems we were having server problems yesterday, and a lot of our posts have disappeared. I wrote a long post to another thread that's gone now.

[hypatia]

Hi everyone.
First of all, thank you for so many great ideas.
Isabeau, could you please tell me how you were using the world map and teaching your son new countries? as my daughter is still young, it seems that a 'country' is a very abstract thing. She amazed me yesterday when i showed her a small black and white worldmap out of the blue and pointed at australia when asked... how do you tell your child what a country is. I use to tell her 'this is where such and such live'. Any other idea?

Awantika: yes we do already have a fairly consistent routine, including a lot of talking and physical activity. My only 'frustration' is that flashcards and reading books are not a success with my daughter so far. But i'm trying to intrigue her and read labels whenever i see some, and we play with foam letters.

Tanikit and Zaja: for the time being, i do not want to confuse my daughter with her reading so i do it in french only. my goal is for her to 'guess' phonics and mixing English and French won't make sense for her i believe. which sucks a bit because i can't find products such as YBCR in French.. My only 'hope' for a DVD is Little Pim in French but i've been waiting for my parcel for 2 months now 

Two more questions:

As some of you might remember, i'm taping words on the wall instead of flashing them, and i noticed that my daughter started doing the action as soon as i started reading the sentence (it is an 'action' wall with sentences such as 'touch your head'. The second i say 'touch', she touches her head and looks at me waiting to be congratulated (i believe), and not looking at the actual words. Is it her way of telling me 'give me something new, mum!' :-)

For maths, is counting rocks, symbols etc. the best way to start on teaching her how to count? when do you move on to after 10?

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