PABIS: Teaching preschoolers at home

At the preschool age, especially, children need to play more than anything else. Every child learns at a different pace, and each child responds differently to different ways of learning. If parents pay attention to their children’s needs, they are the best judges of what works for their child, and they can determine if their child needs more time in some areas. But if a child thinks it’s fun to learn, why stop them?

As promised, here are some of the tools I have used with my son that he has seemed to like. I am guessing that all of you conscientious parents will already be using some of them
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My son loves to do what we call “activity books.” These are the inexpensive workbooks that you can buy at Walmart or Target or other stores that contain worksheets much like kids use in school. Each workbook is marked for the appropriate age.

We don’t do these everyday, and I never force my son to do them. When we have time, I ask him if he wants to work on an activity book, and once we’re working, I can usually tell when his attention starts to wane. We do 2-4 pages at a time. As long as he thinks these books are fun, we’ll use them! He has no idea that it’s “school.”

We play a lot of educational games and do many puzzles. My son loves “The Very Hungry Caterpillar Board Game,” different versions of “the matching game” and the classic “Chutes and Ladders.” Besides skills that each game might focus on (for example, “Chutes and Ladders” helps kids learn counting), games are educational because they help children learn social skills and how to follow directions. Winning can boost their self-esteem too.

Almost everyday my son requests that we do a puzzle together. As he’s gotten older, the puzzles have gotten harder, and now they’re starting to get a little hard for me! Puzzles are extremely beneficial for children. They help with reasoning, problem solving skills, hand-eye coordination and more. (See http://www.suite101.com/content/the-benefits-of-jigsaw-puzzles-a147474)

Lately I have been encouraging my son to learn some sight words. Sight words are common words that we use often, and some educators feel that learning these words by sight will help children on their path to reading. We have a sight word video that my son enjoys watching, but I also came up with a simple game that he enjoys playing. Since I don’t have space here to give the details, I’ll include the URL to my blog post about it: http://mamaofletters.com/2011/02/13/homeschooling-a-fun-sight-word-game/

Arts and crafts are a big part of a preschooler’s life, but unfortunately, I am not a crafty mama, and last year when my son was three, I discovered that he didn’t like to draw or paint anyway. He did like to use scissors though. He couldn’t cut well, but he could cut up paper into small pieces. I was puzzled at first as to how to work with this, but finally I had the idea to cut out animal shapes and use my son’s bits of paper to finish off the animals.
The practice of making paper animals has continued until today, and we have a box full of them. I also created a project in which I made a paper tree on our bulletin board, and then occasionally we’d make a new animal for the tree. Now we have an “ocean” up there.

For a long time, my son asked me to make him a new animal everyday, and he started to help less and less. This was frustrating, and I admit that I was getting tired of making them. Over the past several weeks, however, he’s finally started to help make the animals again, and now he has made several by himself. Having the supplies where he can reach them has helped with this. I’m glad that I didn’t push him because now he also likes to draw and paint more too.

Since I have run out of room, I’ll save the online learning for next week! In the meantime, if you want to see some photos of my son’s creations, you can follow my blog at www.mamaofletters.com.

Shelli Bond Pabis is a Winder resident and columnist for the Barrow Journal. You can reach her at writetospabis@gmail.com.