Hi Everyone,
I was wondering if you could give me some advice on how you divide your time between your children and still help them flourish in an early learning environment. Now no 2 is here I am finding it particulalrly hard to give no 1 the time she needs. I was wondering how you all manage and still get your children to flourish.
Any advice will be greatly appreciated!
I know it can be a struggle. You’re lucky in that you have so much support from your husband but I think that you should’ve taken a small break from any sort of routine with the arrival of Baby 2. I know Doman said never teach if you or baby aren’t feeling completely healthy or able to commit to a routine. Getting ready for baby you probably should’ve 1/2’d or otherwise reduced the program you were doing and then continued the LITE version of this program if at all for the first 6 or 7 weeks of New baby’s life, then gradually built back up to the lite version while you found your bearings with 2 kids, and then returned to the Full program, only once you and your kids were ready.
You might think about doing a few long term, low maintenance solutions and letting the day-to-day program go while you all get a sense of new routine with the new baby… For example, put up labels around the house for all the things in your daughters room, bathroom and the kitchen area where she is allowed. You might put labels on the food. A Big, broad label that reads Ketchup, over the ketchup bottle, or a broad strip on the cereal box that says, of course cereal.
Label toothbrushs, sink, hot, cold, tub, toilet, towel, towel rack, door, window, table, under, chair, rug, toys, dolls, blocks, dishes, plates, spoons, etc. Of course some labels will go ON the items, while others will go right above or behind the item with a little arrow pointing to wear that item is kept. One the labels are up, ideally they stay until deliberately taken down.
You wrote in a recent blog post that your daughter loves and learns from crafts. USE THEM.
It might take a few weeks to a month to get everything in order but start now and download lots of crafts for her that teach words or show quantities. Make little themed books. for example, you could use all sorts of kitchen words and let her label them.
You could start with domestic themes, family; my house, my room, me, kitchen, shopping etc. and have her color and label tons and tons of simple pictures and then keep a library of her books within reach that you two can read over and over again. Using the doman model, you could go from single words to couplets, to sentences and build on each sentence. (Progress from “stove”, white stove…a white stove. a big white stove. A big white stove is in my kitchen.)
If she’s resisting flashcards, you resist too. Maybe she needs a nice break before progressing to a gentle but more traditional reading program. Look into a book called the The Reading Lesson. The first 2 lessons are free from the website www.readinglesson.com I use it on my first graders to get them up and reading.
If you dont like the trial of TRL, check into a book by Sidney Ledson, How To Teach Your Child To Read in 10 Minutes a Day and work on making an “Egg game” to spend a little 1-on-1 time with Oldest DD each day. If not this book, check into other books on learning games and try to play a short one every day. I have never used this program, only because I dont need it since I have TRL and my students are having success with TRL.
BigBaby might also enjoy playing Teachers Assistant when you use flashcards on the NewBaby, so don’t push it right now, she might feel very different when in a couple months you start using them with the newbaby. Continue to meet your 1st girl where she is at, thats the only way she’ll progress, if you go to where she is at and lead her gently, joyfully, step by step through the paces. Actually no, dont LEAD her, Open the windows of opportunity before her, point them out and then get behind her. She might not go anywhere for a couple of months, but then she might take off through one of them in a zigzag pattern. Be ready for that.
Look into Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons, it might look a little strange, but if it works for your darling who cares? You shouldn’t. The lessons are short, laid out explicitly, sequential and its the parent program of TRL, but my students liked TRL better because it was less cluttered/intimidating to them.
New Baby should be pretty easy if she isn’t the naturally fussy type. Play with and talk to her while BigBaby is playing near by and when you get the chance, a newbaby doman routine doesn’t have to be demanding at all. If its stressing you and your hubby too much, you might be in need of an adjustment.
mom2be, your advice is always so helpful, i’m sure everyone benefits from it!
karma to you.
Thank you so much :). I’m glad some one thinks I contribute meaningfully. Sometimes I worry because I dont have any kids of my own and probably wont
for another 3-5 years.
Also, when I said that Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons is the “parent program” of TRL, I dont mean you buy TYCTR100 is for parents while TRL is for the kids. I mean that the authors of TRL were inspired by 100EZ. TRL is a simplified version of 100ez lessons.
TRL is divided into 20 chapter length lessons that you do only a few pages of each day. 100 EZ lesson starts out really slow, then picks up, but is meant to be done one lesson a day.