First Habits/Skills…

Have you seen the Laying Down the Rails book by Sonya (and the dvd too)? It is VERY helpful in habits training. My children are still very young also, but I wish I had read all of that from the beginning. Also the first volume of CM’s writings has a lot to say about younger children and things you can do with them (Home Education). I would highly recommend both of those for ideas. Some of the most mentioned habits, and what seems like most people start with are the habits of attention, obedience, and truthfulness (and this isn’t just outright lying) – there are a lot of fun things mentioned to help train these habits. I would maybe start there as far as habits go.

As far as skills, there are so many things you can teach them at that age – without any type of pressure or formal school. When my oldest son was that age we started keeping a calendar (he was verbal very early, and this made a big difference) and very gently learned the days of the week and numbers. We did a LOT of puzzles, board games appropriate to the younger ages, counted everything and went higher as he got it, we started on letter names and sounds with alphabet magnets, we sorted an organized (mostly the mountains of toys) into categories, folded laundry (that can be interesting), colored (you can start mixing colors), stickers and pasting, painting, planting things, plenty of time outside, and read, read, and read some more. These all sound like fun playing things but a lot of your basic skills can be taught this way. I think then is when we really started going to the library regularly also. I would pick a different animal (or he would sometimes) each time to read about and check out several books on that along with whatever else the topic of the week seemed to be.

I hope this helps and I look forward to the other responses – I have two 2 year olds coming right behind my oldest, I’d love some new ideas 🙂