I am a BookShark Brand Ambassador and did receive curriculum in exchange for sharing details of their product.
Before I began homeschooling I had so many concerns. Before we began schooling, the one thing I had not worried about as much was actually my biggest challenge. (My biggest concern was keeping organized and making sure I covered all the subjects I needed to cover, but our curriculum has taken care of all that with their all-subject package.)
What to do with baby sister!!
When my son began homeschooling my daughter was just 3 months old. So I was teaching him to read while holding a baby in my other arm. As she got older and became more mobile it grew to be more and more challenging. I was sure I was the only one with this problem, but after talking with friends I found out we weren’t alone in this.
I can not give you a definitive answer on what will work for your family, but I am happy to share some of the things that worked for us. I can’t tell you that you will figure it out in the first week. But I am happy to tell you that it does get easier or we are more prepared for it now than we were initially. I wanted to share some of the things we found that have worked for us over the years.
With our children we did try to go screen-free for them until they were over 2, so it felt like it was more of a challenge some days. Such a huge part of me wanted to turn on a movie to distract our daughter so that I could finish school with my son, but we survived with only using screens as a last resort.
Baby Stage
In the baby stage I felt the sleep deprivation! My daughter was NOT a good sleeper. So our recipe for our first year of homeschool success was: exhausted mom, baby that only seemed to sleep when held, and energetic kindergartener.
We were fortunate that our actual homeschool day was only a few hours. We quickly found that as with everything else in life with a baby… we have to work on baby’s schedule. Since she didn’t sleep as much at night she was a champion at napping during the day. So we did school work throughout the day while she was napping or nursing.
Toddler Stage
When our baby gets mobile and begins exploring it feels like all bets are off. Nothing will get done again while this little one climbs up on tables, attempts to eat shoes, makes every attempt to get into the bathroom to do God only knows what, appears to look through the trash for a snack, and has a meltdown when I won’t let her eat the rest of the crayon she started chowing down on. When she began to crawl and walk. It seemed she wanted to eat everything she could get her hands on(even non-food items). it is hard to do anything but clean up messes while asking myself if it’s 7am is too early for a nap already.
How are we supposed to do homeschooling with a toddler on the loose?
It wasn’t easy, and I have to say it was the most difficult years of homeschooling for us so far. We would start on a lesson only to be interrupted by the sound of little sister into something again.
To get our lessons done I knew I had to be prepared and work quickly. I would get my son’s lesson ready and then I would find some way to distract my daughter and hope she would give us a few minutes to get through what we were working on.
When I was working through read-aloud books I would have them both in the same room listening. For some reason if big brother was playing with her toys with her, they were the most interesting thing in the house so she was content playing for awhile. So many history and science lessons took place in our living room floor while they both played with blocks.
When my son had to do writing work at the table I would often put my daughter in her high chair and give her something to play with. She didn’t mind being strapped into the high chair so much because she was at the table with us and probably felt more a part of the action.
I would have them both in the same room listening. For some reason if big brother was playing with her toys with her, they were the most interesting thing in the house so she was content playing for awhile. So many history and science lessons took place in our living room floor while they both played with blocks.
When my son had to do writing work at the table I would often put my daughter in her high chair and give her something to play with. She didn’t mind being strapped into the high chair so much because she was at the table with us and probably felt more a part of the action.
Pre-School
Now my daughter is 4. She watches big brother do his school work and wants to be a part of the action. She now asks for her own school work and is doing a great job with the alphabet and even has been doing some of the kindergarten BookShark curriculum we had used with big brother. When I sit down with my son to read a lesson she sits with us to listen to history. She loves to come and watch our science experiments and gets to help with them.
All the years of trying to keep her in the room with us when we were schooling has paid off. She now has the freedom to go off to her room and play alone while we do school, but more often she chooses to stay near us and listen or take part in the discussions. I don’t think she is going to be able to tell anyone what happened during WWII, or even tell someone what a magnetic field is. But she is learning. Learning to listen to people reading, learning that discussions take place after the lesson. And we are all learning that homeschool is all about taking advantage of any opportunity to learn, and about adapting to our environment so that we can learn.
If I could go back and give myself some advice:
Adapt! What works today won’t necessarily work tomorrow. Being willing to try new things until you find a solution for that day. Being able to change our homeschool schedule so that it fits our family’s schedule is such a huge benefit.
Stay Organized. Organization is not one of my strengths. I love that BookShark has an easy to follow instructor’s guide so that even while the rest of homeschooling might have been chaos, at least I did know what was next.
Grace. So many days I beat myself up because our day didn’t go as I had wanted it to. If I could have just realized it was the stage of life we were in and not all days will go as planned.
Beginning our homeschooling journey with a baby at home was a challenge, keeping my toddler occupied so that we could work through lessons was interesting. But I wouldn’t change a bit of it. My son and I shared many many laughs at the craziness of our day.
