Homeschooling with Little Ones--Part One

How do you homeschool your kids with having a baby or little ones in the house? Homeschooling with little ones can be challenging! However, having a “game plan” always helps me to overcome the challenge.

Here is my “game plan” with a new baby in the house…

First, I decided when I was going to start school. Do I wait till after baby is born (which was the beginning of November) or do I get a head start? I decided to get a head start and we officially started our school year the week after the 4th of July. Needless to say, my kids were not too happy that they had to start working on school work again especially since none of the other neighborhood kids had started school. However, I told them when baby came they would be getting at least a six week break! They seemed to lighten up on the complaining when I told them that news.

Yes, you read correctly…at least six weeks!! Sometimes I have gone for as many as 8 weeks without doing “formal” schooling with my kids after a baby. It basically is a time of adjustment for everyone. It gives me time to rest after having a baby. It gives me time to get into a routine with a new addition. It gives me time to plan. It gives me a relaxed time with my family without any pressures of meeting any goals. It is also a time where I can fit in field trips, errands, and other things (like read alouds, board games, and art/craft projects) that I normally can’t fit in during our school year. I figure that my kids are learning even by playing Legos or K’nex, watching videos, playing with each other and helping me out around the house that doing “formal” schooling is not a necessity while trying to adjust to the new addition.

Once we get back into a routine, ie knowing when baby is going to take naps or needing to be fed, I start working back in the “book work” starting with Math. You probably are wondering why I start with Math? We start with reviewing basics and work back up to where we were before our new addition. Math seems to be the subject that my kids seem to lose the facts the fastest.

Once we get going on a routine, it looks like this at first….Reading and Math usually ends up only taking us an hour at first to get thru those subjects. Then as the weeks progress we add back in Writing/Language Arts/Spelling, History and then Science. Science is the last of the subjects that I add back in because usually I find it harder to keep up with doing experiments and such. Usually Science is added into the mix at about week 3 of getting back into the school routine.

The bottom line is to take the amount of time that you need to take to get yourself and your family into a routine that works well with everyone.

Next week, I’ll be giving some suggestions as to how to handle having that toddler pulling at your leg or begging for things while trying to school the older children.

Part Two of the series--keeping toddlers occupied