or chili, even if I asked them to help with our studies. (They may think twice about Tofu Helper, however.)
Part 2
Tackling Kids of Any Age
IN THIS PART …
Balance babies and toddlers as you teach the older children. If your toddler-now-preschooler is ready for some instruction, you can introduce some basics while instructing everyone else.
Educate your elementary students with flair. Locate some of the curricula that works well with younger students, whether you need language arts, math, or science.
Work with your middle schooler or junior-high student. If you’re just starting out with a child who’s not quite reached high school, this might be the perfect time to begin.
Discover the joys of teaching high schoolers, whether you start here as a new homeschooler or grow your way here after 11 or 12 years of home education. Plan your courses, complete the transcript, and add up all those credits.
Learn about life after high school and the choices available to homeschool graduates. Trade and vocational schools, a career in the military, and college or university life are all within the reach of homeschooled students.
Chapter 5
Teaching Your Toddler While You Change Your Baby
IN THIS CHAPTER
Congratulations! Your home contains a new bundle of joy, and now you’re trying to figure out how to educate the rest of your happy brood while taking care of the almost endless needs of the new baby. You’ll enter the preschool stage soon.
Look to this chapter for hints, tips, and suggestions for making it through this tiring time of your life. This section gives you ideas for merging baby duties with the need for teaching the older children who grace your life. After you wean your little one from the bottle and diapers, also check here for preschool pointers that help you have a good time with your child and learn too.
Juggling Primers, Preschoolers, and Diapers
You’re home from the hospital, the bambino never sleeps more than one hour at a time, and you already wish the little critter could walk. Which parent normally takes charge of the children during school time is pretty irrelevant at this point: Everybody’s tired when a new baby comes to stay, and life goes on hold for awhile.
When diapers and feedings fill your life, it seems like one more thing will send you over the edge. Yet your older children need to put in a “good” school day; they need time and energy, too. You can make homeschooling work with an infant without earning your Super-Driven Parent of the Year Award or purchasing a one-way ticket to the funny farm.
Unfortunately, a new child generally doesn’t choose the most convenient time to announce its arrival. If you plan to produce a child during the off-school summer months, you’re dreaming or you have better planning skills than I ever did. So far, I’ve managed the oh-no-we’re-halfway-into-fall child and the oops-it’s-not-time-for-spring-vacation-what-do-we-do-now baby.
Turn baby care time into home economics class for an older child. Diapering, feeding, cooing, and cuddling are all considered a part of Child Development class in the public high schools. Take advantage of your homegrown opportunity to teach the basics to your other children. Giving an older child — one who is ready for such responsibility — the baby to care for one morning a week after a period of solid training frees you for teaching, paperwork, or a long hot bath. And it gives the older sibling the training most of us wish we’d had before we found ourselves caring for our own little drooling bundles of love.
Take advantage of natural down times. You have to feed the baby on and off throughout the day anyway. Babies don’t do well with cereal for breakfast and nothing to eat until that cheeseburger for lunch. Because feeding becomes part of your daily routine, take advantage of it! While you’re feeding, listen to emerging readers strut their stuff, pile onto the bed together for an oral history lesson, ask an older child to read the next chapter of that book that you’re working through together, or practice the foreign language you’ve been learning as a family. “I kiss my pig on the mouth” (“J’embrasse mon couchon sur la bouche!”) may sound kind of strange in French, but if your youngsters have the vocabulary for sentences like that, such pronouncements are guaranteed to keep their interest while you feed the baby.
Put everybody under three feet tall down for a nap. Then take that time to work with the older children on the subjects that require one-on-one attention or pull out the science equipment marked Use Caution or Not For Use By Children Under X Years of Age and conduct the experiments that you wanted to do for the past two months.
Institute quiet time for the entire household. You don’t have to jump up from the kitchen table and rush back to the schoolroom or computer. Sometimes, marking that hour or two after lunch as quiet time puts a little sanity back into your day. Put the tiniest family member down for a nap and distribute books to everybody who is both too old and too young to take a nap — when they reach college age, they’ll appreciate naptime once again. You’re allowed to lie down with a book, too! After everyone catches some well-deserved rest, then continue with your day. You may even find that your littlest ones (or you) face the rest of the afternoon with a better attitude.
Although your neighbors may not be doing it, life still continues if you take a month or two off in February — or whenever your bundle arrives at your house. Then teach through the summer days to make up for “lost” time. Even if your house lacks air conditioning, learning outside
