Blog Cruise: Don't let the baby eat the lesson

The Review Crew question for this week is "How do you homeschool with children of multiple ages? How do you handle toddlers?" (Click on the ship to see more entries--they will be posted on Tuesday.)

Right now we have a middle schooler and a third grader--no toddlers or preschoolers. But I've been there too.

This year, we're using a modified version of Sue Patrick's Workbox system for the girls' individual work (including subjects with Mama Squirrel); each girl has a series of boxes or magazine files holding the work that's to be done next. We try to get together at least once, preferably twice during each school day for group readalouds and other activities. Since we don't have any "littles" who need to be constantly supervised, things usually go fairly smoothly. The girls don't do a lot of subjects together, but if there's something appropriate for both (like nature study) then we do it in "group time." I do try to streamline the amount of reading aloud I do, which means either asking the girls to read some of their own books, or just cutting back on the total number of readings we get done per day.

But school with little ones around? That's a different story. If you have toddlers (say 18-month-olds), about all I can say is be prepared for lots of noise, and try not to let them empty the bookshelves. We actually had to move school up to the (less-distracting) living room for awhile while one of the Squirrelings was in her See Me Empty Shelves phase. Some people use a toddler's nap time for serious school work, but at that point sometimes you feel like you need a nap yourself, so that doesn't always work. Just do whatever works--distract them, include them, use toys, get them to stay in a defined area, use a sibling babysitter for as long as a math lesson takes--and realize that, sooner or later, each of these little people is going to be part of the homeschool group too.

They absorb way more than you'd think, just being part of things (in our case, that included part of a Lauri puzzle and a speedily-intercepted meal of magnetic words. Our Cuisenaire rods also have teeth marks in them.) When Crayons was born and our midwife came over for a post-natal visit, she was a bit startled to hear preschooler Ponytails talking about Mozart and Vivaldi (she called him Baldy, but that's all right).