Skills Check Lists

Yes, please keep in mind that my intention is to home school my children and I'm not pushing anything on her really (perhaps someone should come visit just to observe and make sure) as soon as she looses interest we move on. We do about 2 or 3 things a day.

For example: she has a pot full of different and interesting erasers. We count them, match colour, just play silly games with it. Sometimes we will take it further and add cards with numbers and their name for example 3 three and 3 dots and then she has to put 3 erasers to correspond with the dots. We play loads of games, I bought games that are like snakes and ladders where you move your cue, there is one for colour, one for numbers, one for patterns and one for shapes. We are learning that you can't always win

She loves cutting practice and for this I just make lines and funny things on scrap paper that she needs to cut up. Nothing hectic. We do not spend more than an hour (combined) per day on 'learning' type activities.

The Bazoo magazine has cute play ideas to go with their stories. The first one has building a road in the garden with a pot as grandmas house and just like that B spends hours outside driving her cars around the garden!

Nothing wrong with making those activities that the lists say they should know a fun learning activity... its not as if one sits and drills them to know to the stuff... They learn the majority of the stuff at school too...

The school readiness tests require them to know most of these things before starting school in any case... and rather have them learn a skill through playing than when they get to school and its drilled into them, and therefore its no longer fun for them...

Marijke,

Thanks for the link, I love the magazine!

Hi there

I also dont believe in these checklists... Opened the 2-3 year old link with some trepidation, as my little one is turning 3 in July and only started school at the beginning of the year... She stayed at home with a nanny up until January. We would leave daily activities for the nanny to do with her, with we expanded on on weekends...

Am relieved to see that she is on par - and ahead in some of the things that she should be able to do...

We have 3 months to get her to count to 20 now...

Thanks for this link!

What is it with girls and princesses and pink!!

We don't really do anything, or up until this point we haven't done anything specific. She loves playing Ipad and has a lot of 'educational' apps but most are in english and we aren't english.

When she was about 2 - 2.5 I saw she was having trouble with colours for example and we did colour 'units'. For example I collected everything red, added it to red coloured rice as a sensory bin and just increased our use of colours in every day life. Two colours I never did with her, black and brown and she still struggles with telling them apart.

We are now doing bazoo afrikaans magazine (www.bazoo.co.za/) I back ordered a while back. We are on the first edition and it's about family and they bake bread. So today we did letter B, Baked a Bread, make a hand print autumn tree (Boom) and Blue circles. Tomorrow we will be making a flower (Blom) with Bubble wrap, colouring a picture, sorting capital and small letter Bb's, matching numbers to amounts of butterflies and a family tree and tracing B's.

It's not structured and with a 4 month old I can't predict how days go, but I'm trying. She loves dot to dot pictures so that helps with the counting and writing practice.

Would love to start a blog to keep up with everything but don't know how anyone has time for that!