To teach a 3 year old

Hannah and I have been doing a 20-30 minute slot of "school" for the last couple of weeks, most days. It helps give us Hannah and Mummy time (and often Briona joins in if she's not sleeping) and extends her learning. Most of you know I intend to homeschool but what I thought I'd do is update on here what we've been doing because it's not limited to would-be-homeschoolers.


A couple of weeks ago I went and bought her a book ($7) on shapes, we have been doing 2-4 pages per day (she loves it!) on recognising shapes, finding particular shapes in a picture, colouring in, and even tracing. She is not fully comfortable with a pen-hold yet (although Briona has automatically picked it up on her own?!?) so that's something I'm working on.

While Hannah is exploring shapes, Briona and I colour in a picture of her colouring-in book (I got about 100 page one for $4 yay!) which is her "school"

On Tuesday we went grocery shopping and she held and "beeped" the scanner for me for the first time... after that though we went to the Library for our "school" slot. Apparently learning to rhyme (mad dad sad etc) is a good head-start into reading so I went and got some good old Dr Seuss books for us to read together at home. The girls really enjoyed going there, I think I'm going to make it a fortnightly thing.

Today we looked at ice. I had 4 icecream containers half-full of water set up outside and the girls helped me load a full two trays of ice into them. We explored whether they melted faster if they were left, stirred with a wooden spoon, in cold water or warm water.... I added some water from the (hot) kettle into one of the containers and taught her about hot and cold making warm.

Sometime in the near future I'll be introducing colours. We have two ice trays so one of them just has regular water/ice in it but in the other one I have put coloured water: some blue and some yellow. I'm sure you can figure out what we're going to do with them I think it will actually be a good amuser tool for pre-dinner tonight

More to come, but feel free to add your own!

Edited by busymum

Wow I'm really impressed, it sounds like your girls are having a great time learning. You have some really good ideas there, I may just steal some.

I may just have to get of my backside and start being a little more pro active with Abigail.

I  love those alphabet magenets from leapfrog, my friend has them and she said she was going to get them for Andrew for his birthday - so hoepfully she does.

am sure you do in ways that you probably dont even realise.

another thing i have done - out of sheer necessity cos they always fought and got things mixed up, is to label their chairs, and their drink bottles - their chairs have the full name on it, and their drink bottles - (usually just the plastic throw away sippers) i stick a P or an A on them.. paris already knew her name.. but now ayja will pick it up and check to make sure it has her letter on it before she drinks from it.

Edited by mum2paris

I get the coloured bath fizzes or bath graffiti to make the bath different colours. I find food colouring stains a wee bit.

Brae and i visit the library once a week. He loves the doctor seus books, hairy mcleary, or books by margaret mahy.
I found some really great maths books at the book store. 4 books in a set, sizes and shapes, numbers, measuring and counting. QED start maths its called. Most of it is a bit beyond Brae at the mo, but we'll get there. He loves reading time. Thats what learning is all about.

Becks that's why I love the library so much! I'm so not into reading one particular favourite book (whichever one it is at the time) 100 times in a single week!!

Kiya memorised Hairy Maclary! So cute!

Oh yay for Paris!

Hannah knows "H" for Hannah, "B" for Briona, then you ask her what is for Mummy and she says "T"... oh yea - Teresa. Caught me offguard the first time, I couldn't get how she got the mmmm sound so wrong! She was spelling my name (Teresa) out the other day with her uncle/my brother/our boarder, he instructed all the letters and she typed them on the computer. Then she got to the end and thought an "h" on the end would make it look better - obviously to make it look a bit like her name lol

Liz I have a Thomas fanatic here, he knows all the engines names, colours, and getting the numbers sorted now. Andrew has a Thomas computer game that he plays with DH which is helping him more.