How to Homeschool with Preschooler Siblings

A question I get a lot is “What does your daughter do when you’re doing school work with your son?”

That is an excellent question. She is a busy girl, is very outgoing, and always wants to be doing something. Even though she’s not school aged yet, she needs to be learning too. So what does she do?

This question comes up a lot in homeschooling forums I follow. Many homeschoolers have three or more kids, and when their oldest is just getting started with homeschooling, these moms are also learning how to homeschool with, in many cases, toddlers and babies underfoot.

Charlotte Mason wrote, “In this time of extraordinary pressure, educational and social, perhaps a mother’s first duty to her children is to secure for them a quiet growing time, a full six years of passive receptive life, the waking part of it spent for the most part out in the fresh air.” Home Education, page 44

That’s an ideal, isn’t it? No formal lessons until age 6. Let kids be kids and free play, mostly outdoors. It’s an ideal. But for my family, it is honestly not reality. I aspire to have these free range kids who play for hours a day on a homestead wearing linen clothing – but the truth is that I live in suburban California. I try to follow Charlotte Mason’s philosophy as well as I can, recognizing that I’m living 100 years in the future, in the middle of Silicon Valley. I’m also homeschooling through a public charter, so we have some standards to meet for math and reading.

Some parts of the Charlotte Mason method just do not work well for my family. And so I adapt, and that’s okay.

How do we make sure that our younger children don’t get forgotten, while also making sure they have a “quiet growing time” full of free play, a lot of time outside, and great living books? How do we keep preschoolers occupied without screens when teaching our older children their math lessons?

A good start to the day

Starting the school day off with some one-on-one time with me makes a huge difference to having a happy preschooler who is cooperating with the “group plan” of doing school work. Sometimes this means playing a game with mom before school starts, having her own “special lessons”, or doing a special chore with me. Oftentimes, when my daughter is being purposely distracting and trying to derail the lessons – it is because she is feeling left out. So I try to start the day with some special time, just for her, to fill up her attention-cup.

Special Story

We start our homeschool day with stories on the couch. These may be some portions of our school books, like history, geography, and science, or a novel we are reading aloud. Every day, one of the stories is a special story just for my daughter. We are working our way through living picture books that align with a specific virtue each week. You can follow along with this project. Here are some of the posts I’ve done:

• Kids Books About Assertiveness
• Kids Books About Creativity
• Kids Books About Peacefulness
• Kids Books About Caring
• Kids Books About Cleanliness
• Kids Books About Consideration
• Kids Books About Confidence
• Kids Books about Enthusiasm
• Kids Books about Courtesy

Listening and Participating Alongside…sometimes

My daughter also listens to my son’s school books as they are read aloud, and participates as she is willing. Sometimes she plays nearby, sometimes she wants to narrate (explain what we read in her own words) too.

I will admit that this sounds like my home is always sunshine and rainbows. Believe me, it’s not. Some days, she is not into it. Some days she purposely tries to be distracting, and if I’ve already given her lots of attention that morning, I get so frustrated! As I’ve written this blog post, I’ve been reflecting on this time and what I could do differently. I’m reminded of some tools that I learned from How to Talk So Little Kids Will Listen by Joanna Faber and Julie King. So next week, I’m going to try this and I’ll report back in an update to this post if it works:

• Give in fantasy what I can’t give in reality: I’m going to try saying something like “You don’t feel like listening to these school stories right now. You wish I could listen to you and play with you. I wish I had two heads, so one head could read with your brother and listen and talk to him and the other head could listen and talk with you!” Then, depending on how she responds, I might suggest she draw a picture of a two-headed mom….
• Give a choice between two acceptable options: “You can play in your bedroom as quiet as a bunny or as loud as a lion. Which way do you want to play in your bedroom?”
• Put the child in charge: I will ask my daughter to set our visual school timer for 10 minutes and let us know when it’s time to stop reading.
• And when none of that is working because she is just in an all-out cantankerous mood, I will try to take action without insult. “I’m going to get you settled with an audiobook in your bedroom. I can’t let you be disruptive on purpose.” and I carry her up the stairs and put on Amelia Bedelia.

Will it help? Stay tuned…

Tabletop Activities

My final strategy for occupying my preschooler when we are doing subjects like Math – that really require my undivided attention to teach my older child his lesson – is the Preschooler School Menu. This is just a table I created with pictures I found online of quiet table-top activities that we have for her to play with during our lessons. We are all sitting at the table together and my daughter loves looking over her menu and choosing something for me to pull out for her to work on. It helps her feel included and it keeps her nearby and out of trouble!

Want a free copy of this school menu? Join my mailing list and send me an email using my contact form and I’ll happily send it to you!

Table top Activities for Toddlers and Preschoolers

Curious about some of the products I reference in these menus? Here are links to our favourite quiet tabletop activities! This list contains Amazon affiliate links, and I’m so grateful if you purchase through my links! Thank you!

First things first – products to contain the mess:

This silicon baby suction dish is something I had when my son was a baby. But I’ve found it to be amazing for containing beads, legos, paint, or white glue during craft time. Don’t throw out your silicon suction baby dishes because you think you’re beyond that baby stage – these have a lifetime of uses!

My daughter knows to pull out her silicone craft mat before she starts her crafts – it gives her a workspace and protects the table. I have this one:

Beading/Threading activities:

A pony bead kit. Okay I’m going to recommend one that your preschooler will grow into, so that you only have to buy one kit. This one will last your child’s entire crafting life if you’re like me – and when your 3 year old child is finished making their beautiful necklace, you secretly cut the beads off and put them back in the container for use another day. The nice thing about this Bead Pet Kit is that as they get older, they can learn to follow patterns and instructions for more complicated beading projects. Bead Pets make great homemade gifts for their friends. This Bead Pet kit also comes with a couple handy project storage cases – so you can keep a few beads easily accessible and keep the other 1550 beads in a closet for a future time. One of my life hacks for containing preschool craft mess is to never let my preschooler have access to 1000+ beads in something that can spill.

The Bead Pet projects are probably too difficult for most preschoolers to complete without your help (though they can definitely do them with your help) but just general creative beading is something my daughter enjoys doing during our table-time when I’m helping my son with math and you can definitely use the beads and string for general beading.

Also, I recommend bringing pipe cleaners also known as chenille straws to the table for smaller hands.

Lacing cards are another toy that helps with a preschooler’s fine motor control. There are many different kinds for sale. I think the wooden ones are worth getting because they will last longer than cheap cardboard ones.

Playdough and Putties

Playdough is a great hand-strengthening quiet table top activity. I keep the playdough along with some toys to go with it in a plastic bin in my dining room.

I have made my own playdough in the past, but honestly – the Play-Doh branded stuff works so well and I can often find it on sale for less than $1 a container, so I just go with that.

When my kids go to the dentist and bring home toy prizes – they go to live in the playdough bin.

Other great playdough bin add-ons that my kids enjoy:

• Playdough extruders (great for hand strengthening!)

• Dough scissors. I bought a multi-pack, kept two pairs for us, and then gave a pair along with some dough as birthday gifts to little friends.

• Barrel of monkeys. Okay, these are the most played with item in the playdough bin. My kids love building monkey playgrounds for these monkeys with the dough and random slinkies and other prizes they got from the dentist.

• Kids cutting board and kids knife. These knives actually do work in the kitchen with real food, so they are multi-purpose and you can’t cut your fingers with this knife! This unicorn one is all my daughter wanted one year for her birthday, so that’s why we have this one, but there are definitely more affordable options out there! Plastic knives and a pie plate would also work just as well!

• Alphabet dough mats: Learning to form letters with dough is a great preschool activity! We have these dough mats and I like them because they wipe up really well and are reusable.

Other putties: Theraputty: We learned about this product at my son’s occupational therapy appointments. Hide some of the pony beads from the pony bead kit recommended above in this theraputty and have you preschooler pull the putty apart trying to find the treasures and then thread them onto a pipecleaner. Warning, this putty is best at a table – it doesn’t come out of clothes/carpet very well.

Kinetic Sand: Kinetic sand is a huge hit at our house. We use it to play construction, monster trucks, find buried treasure, and build sandcastles. It cleans up easily and as long as my kids play with it at the table, the mess is pretty well contained.

Sink n’ Sand Game using Kinetic Sand: This game kept my daughter busy for an hour. It’s fun to play all together as a board game, or just play with the set up on her own. Do you remember the marble game Kerplunk? It’s like that except with kinetic sand.

Low-Mess Coloring and Painting Activities

Paint with Water activity books

Color by Number activity books. We like this one because it’s not too difficult for the preschool aged kids just learning their numbers.

Mosaic Art Activities

Lite bright. My daughter loves rainbows and making patterns with her lite bright. I highly recommend using the silicon suction baby dish linked above to hold the little lights while working on a lite bright picture.

Pattern Shape Blocks. These are an excellent preschool math learning toy, and the blocks will come in handy in early elementary math education as manipulatives.

Geoboards. These pegboards are really fun to play with. I’m linking a set that comes with two geoboards and multi-colored elastic bands because if you have two kids, trust me, you want two geoboards. These geoboards have also been useful in our early elementary math education for exploring shapes, symmetry, angles, and lines.

Wood Shapes Nature Play Art

Cutting and Glueing Activities

Maybe it’s overboard to recommend specific scissors but I really like this 4 pack. The scissors actually cut, they don’t splay to the side like some kids scissors, they are comfortable for my kids to hold. And 4 pack because I don’t know about your home, but in my home…the scissors are NEVER where they are supposed to be. Scissors are always walking away.

Cutting activity book: Sometimes on Amazon, I’ve ordered self-published activity/workbooks, and honestly they have been very poor quality inside. The cover looks beautiful and fun, and then inside it’s tiny poor quality printouts to cut or color. Anyways, now I steer clear from anything that isn’t published by a reputable company. I really like the products by SchoolZone brand for preschool workbooks.

My daughter really likes using the Elmer’s white school glue to glue wood shapes together. It will occupy her for quite a while as she makes little wood stacks and pictures.

Stickers

Stickers for toddlers: If you have a little one who still has trouble peeling paper stickers off of the backing paper, the best stickers for little hands are puffy stickers like these ones.

Sticker books: My kids have really enjoyed the scenes and stickers in the Usborne branded sticker books.

Other Colorful Activities

Stamps and Ink Pads

Crayola Scribble Scrubbies: These are worth every penny! Oh man, these have kept my preschooler SO busy. She loves coloring and bathing these little pets. The set with the pump shower is totally worth it. You just put a little bit of water in the tub and push that pink button, and water will pump up through the shower head. I store them in a pencil case.

Building Toys

Flower Arrangement Toy. This toy has been a hit! There are many different brands available on Amazon, but I linked this one because it comes with a storage case. My daughter has enjoyed making floral arrangements for our dinner table!

Duplo: Duplo is great, and as long as you’re not dumping a million pieces out, it’s a pretty quiet activity. My kids have really enjoyed a playground-themed kit that includes speciality slide/ladder and swing pieces similar to what you’d find in this amusement park kit. Duplo kits like these are fun to build, but even more fun to play with!

Math Link Cubes. These math link cubes are fun to click together and build different shapes. They are easy enough for small hands to push together and they don’t make a noise when they click together (unlike magformers, which we also like – but they are too noisy/distracting to play with during school lessons at the table). These cubes have also been useful for our elementary math curriculum.

So there you have it, an answer to the question, “What does your preschooler do during homeschool lessons?”. If you’d like my free visual activity menu full of ideas your toddlers can pick and choose from, please join my mailing list and send me an email through my contact form to receive your free copy! I tried to find pictures of kids playing with the activities, because usually my daughter finds it more inspiring when she sees other kids doing it.

-Heather