For several months now, I’ve been posting pictures to a
Facebook album called Tot School, showing some of the learning activities I do
with the kids. The reason for the album is to put ideas out there for any other
parents of young kids who like to do fun pre-preschool stuff too. I was nervous
about this right from the beginning, though, as it has the potential to look
like showing off. Kind of gives off the vibe, “I not only having my 2-year-old
painting triangles – I made the paint myself out of MILK! What do YOU do?” My
fears were revived when one of my friends approached me the other day and said
good-naturedly, “I saw your facebook album, and I thought, ‘I am a terrible
mother!’” Even though she was joking, I felt the time was ripe to explain why
and how we do tot school.
There are four main reasons why I tot school my kids. (And
just to clear up any ambiguity, I didn’t create the phrase “tot school”; it’s
in use on a number of blogs that are aimed at early childhood education. It
seems to focus primarily on ages 1-3, and there are even a good number of such
activities aimed at babies.)
1. It’s fun for me. Everyone needs a hobby, and mine is tot
school. I get the same kick out of creating a sensory bin or a theme-related
gross motor exercise as many people do out of sewing, scrapbooking, or hiking.
I love to unwind after a hard day by staging a date with my laminator. Yes, I
own a laminator.
2. It’s fun for my kids. Rose absolutely loves tot school
and usually requests to “do some school” several times a day. For a really
active, rowdy kid (like Everett is turning out to be), our activities would
look a lot different and a lot less “schoolish”. But with open-mindedness the
right sort of planning to address each personality and learning style, I think
a version of tot school can be fun for just about any kid.
3. It’s a bonding experience. Like most kids her age, Rose
likes to learn, but I think even more important to her motivation is that
school is a little piece of the day when I focus entirely on her and we get to
enjoy doing stuff (basically playing) together. This is a big part of what I
love about it as well. For us, tot school fills that need for mother-daughter
time and shared experiences.
4. It is one way of helping my kids grow healthy brains and
prepare them for lifelong learning. I do think there is some benefit to the
activities we do. Most importantly, I think it shows my kids how much fun
learning can be and ignites an excitement for reading and exploring their
world, which will hopefully serve them well later, both in school and in
general life.
Note that I said this is “one way” of preparing my kids for
school and life. I certainly don’t think it is the only way, nor do I think you
are setting your child up for academic failure if you don’t do tot school per
se. I excelled in school despite the fact that my own mom never heard of or
attempted to implement tot school. This is not to say that my mom didn’t
prepare me for formal learning, though. She certainly did, through informal
teaching and mostly just through using everyday situations as opportunities to
discuss and learn.
I do think it is important to help your young child develop
a healthy mind, but I don’t think there is any one method for doing this. Parents
who engage with their children and enjoy doing things and going places together
as a family will naturally do what is necessary to help their children learn.
God created children to explore and inquire, to challenge themselves, and to
develop healthy minds. Given a safe, loving and stimulating environment with an
active caregiver, and barring the interference of any learning disabilities,
they will do so without any fancy activities or equipment.
So if you see pins for creative and artsy preschool
activities and feel a sense of guilt that those kind of things don’t appeal to
you, or if they do appeal to you on the surface but actually spending the time to do them dampens your enthusiasm, stop right there. You are not doing anything wrong, even by foregoing tot school
entirely. I’m not an expert on early education, but I got some training in it
and have learned a lot in my own self-directed learning since then. From my
perspective, this is what you should focus on doing for the first 3-5 years of
your child’s life, whether or not you tot school:
1. Interact. Talk with your kid, do everyday stuff together,
enjoy experiences together. Your kid will learn best from the things that
happen in the course of life by simply talking to you and watching you. Keep
your screen time to a minimum during your children’s waking hours; those are
your hours to engage their minds simply by being mentally and emotionally
available to them. Be watchful for teachable moments.
2. Teach practical life skills. Keep your eyes open for the
sorts of things your child might be ready to tackle next: self-dressing,
cleaning up toys after play, drinking from a big kid cup, helping you bake, using
good manners, folding dish cloths. These things are hugely foundational for the
kind of ordered thinking and self-discipline needed for later school success.
It takes an initial time investment to teach these things, but then having your
kid be a little more self-sufficient frees up some of your time too. (I just
want to confess here, I haven’t done well at this with Rose. Now we are
starting to back up some from schoolish stuff and do more of these kinds of
skills because I see how important they are.)
3. Love your kid. No matter how cognitively advanced your
kid may or may not be, their success in school is tremendously dependent on
their emotional health and the strength of their family bonds. Meet their
physical needs, spend time bonding one-on-one with each child doing the things
they like best, show them that you are always there for them, help them build a
healthy self-image and respect for others, teach them about God’s love in
meaningful ways, plan fun family times, and prioritize the health of your
marriage.
If you do these things, I really think you can’t go wrong. Living
in Africa has reminded me that even in families where the parents have little
formal education themselves and don’t purposefully set out to prepare their
children academically for school from an early age, children can succeed
because they have healthy families and healthy childhoods. In the situations
where they have been adequately nourished and raised in a secure environment,
by the time they start school they have spent six years exploring, observing, and
imitating. They enter school with the best piece of educational equipment: a
healthy mind, ready for formal learning.
The time you could spend tot-schooling could just as profitably be spent investing extra energy in these essential things.
And for those of you who do get as excited as I do about threading
beads onto pipe cleaners, freezing toys inside blocks of ice, or making bath
paint from shaving foam – stay tuned! The next few blog posts will be for you.
I’ll be sharing some of my favorite sources and our own ever-changing method of
doing tot school.
