Create a Preschool at Home
Chores, Kitchen Science, Child-Friendly Home Lead to Early Learning
Create an early learning center right in your own home, using everyday activities and kid-friendly resources.
There’s no shortage of early learning opportunities for tiny tots these days. But there’s also plenty you can do to create a rich, stimulating and meaningful educational environment for your young children right in your own home. And you don’t need a lot of fancy equipment to do it.
Everyday Learning
Everyday activities, from routine chores to playtime, can provide a wealth of learning opportunities for even the very youngest of children. Simple chores, like emptying a trash can or putting away clothes, offer not only lessons in responsibility, but provide fine motor skills practice, and education in home economics and health. Letting small children help with cooking not only serves to involve them in a vital part of family life, but can lead to some simple and effective science lessons.
Kitchen Classroom
The kitchen actually provides one of the best early learning environments in your home. It can be everything from a science lab to a reading room to an art studio! For the smallest of children, the kitchen provides some wonderful sensory experiences – just make them safe ones by doing the usual to keep small hands from hot surfaces and other things that hurt.
Throw together some edible play dough ( a cup of peanut butter, a cup of honey and enough dry powdered milk to make it firm) or let them string pasta beads. Almost as messy but good clean fun is letting your children explore form and color with kitchen bubbles. A half cup of water and a half cup of dishwashing liquid, with a dash of vegetable oil can make dishwashing a whole lot of fun for everyone by creating a good quality bubble solution.
Turn Off the TV
The rest of your home can also be a great early learning center. It really helps to keep the TV off as much as possible, for a number of reasons. Children who don’t rely on TV for stimulation are a lot more likely to use their own imaginations to come up with things to do – and if the only things they have to do are not only entertaining but educational, they benefit twice!
Home as a Learning Center
Creating an environment where young children have easy access to books, paper, pencils and crayons, music they enjoy, puzzles and games. Make sure toys actively engage children, and they can be easily reached, on low bookshelves and small tables. Things like Legos, blocks, and other manipulatives, clothes for playing dress up, fabric remnants, and felt story boards will keep even very young children busy for hours.
And don’t overlook boxes! Boxes are the next best thing to sliced bread, when it comes to young children. Big boxes can be houses, cars, airplanes, and turtle shells. Little boxes, like shoe boxes, can be turned into all sorts of things and used for sorting things as well.
Be sure to make lessons in responsibility achievable for your children by providing appropriate places for them to put everything away, too. And there’s no need to buy a lot of things. You can simply rotate items every few weeks. Very small children find old things new again when they disappear for a while and then suddenly reappear.
Do some educational decorating in your children’s rooms. Instead of cartoon characters, consider putting up a world map, pictures of planets, and posters of plants and animals. Set up a big chalk or white board easel in your child’s room, or paint a wall with chalkboard paint (and be sure they know only their wall can be used in this way!).
The opportunities for early learning at home are endless, and can provide some of the most memorable learning experiences for both you and your children.
See also Everyday Science, Recognizing the Learning Moment
