Now that my toddler has become a preschooler, my structure for learning at home seemed to be falling short. So what does that mean? Should I just quit doing lessons at home? No! It just means I needed to find a new way to make our home lessons more meaningful and convenient.
I absolutely love my daughter’s preschool, and even more important, SHE LOVES IT! So I decided to find a way to compliment her learning at school with additional activities at home. Her teacher has great weekly themes, which provides me the opportunity to build on them.
In addition, I started reading a book called The Montessori Toddler by Simone Davies. This book gave me an idea on how to structure my home learning activities. I am now creating activities that stay within our weekly theme, but let her have more independence.
My New Structure
It still all starts with books! I see what books I currently have at home which fit within the theme. Then, I check out additional books from the library. My goal is to have around 10 books for the week. These are displayed on the top on the table I use to organize my whole week of tot activities.
Under the books you will notice I have 4 colorful tubs, each with a lid. I just bought these on Amazon and LOVE them! They are very study, plenty big to fit multiple materials, and fit in my shelf perfectly. This is where I place the 4 themed activities for the week. I introduce these to my daughter so that she knows what is expected, but then they are available for her to practice at her choosing.
Reasons I LOVE this new structure:
- Easy- I clean out the tubs on Sunday and load them up with 4 new activities for the upcoming week. I usually do a quick Pinterest search to get ideas and then pull together what I need to place in the tubs. Then, no real work for the whole week!
- Flexibility- I would love to say that tot school fits in my schedule every day when I have it in my calendar, but that just isn’t realistic. By having everything already prepped and in the tubs, we can do a quick lesson whenever we have 20-30 minutes to fill.
- Independence- My daughter loves that these tubs are ready and at her level. Once I have introduced the activity, she can just pull a tub and do the activity on her own. She is getting very good at taking out a tub, playing with it, then cleaning it up before returning it to the shelf.
- Appealing- As I was reading The Montessori Toddler, I learned more about the importance of making the learning area look interesting yet simple. My daughter is more drawn to these 10 books that I display than the hundreds of other books in our house. These 4 tubs, that she knows have fun activities, are more exciting to her than her toy room full of things. The simple and predictable arrangement is very inviting.
- Organized- If you can’t tell from my previous blogs, I love structure and organization. With this model, everything has a place to be kept, thus a place to be returned when done!
This blog entry may seem a little overwhelming, but I think it will be pretty easy to understand once you see how I structured this week’s activities with a Halloween theme.
Sorry it has been a while since my last post, but finding a new system that worked well took some time. Now that I have settled on something that I enjoy and works well for us, I plan to get back to posting more regularly!