The Beginning

I have a four-year old and a nine-month old. When I made the decision not to send my son to school last year (despite some frowns and naysayers who were convinced my husband and I were making the wrong decision), I came up with a plan to keep him both stimulated and playful.

I decided that teaching my sons is so much fun that I want to blog about it and tell others what I'm doing and how it's working.  My emphasis is on practical lessons that are cost-effective and mostly use what we already own (or recyclables).  Earth and humanely conscious.

Every day, we start with an activity board.  (See below.  The board is a little crazy because I insist on reusing and teaching my son about recycling, and because... well, we're a little crazy.;) ) Flash cards are made of different activities.  "Reading" and "Writing" are done everyday on alternate days as is the "Anand" card, which means interacting with my younger son, and "Quiet Time".  My son gets to pick some of his lessons; I pick some.  Then we carry out our day in no particular order: his lessons and activities get done as time permits throughout the day.

So far, so good.  My son Sathya began reading on his own (!) by age four.  My younger son Anand is being stimulated at a young age by the lessons that Sathya is learning. Caveat: note that most of these lessons are geared toward Sathya and done with Sathya only; when Anand is a little older, he will begin participating in the activity board.  (I do teach him things too, but I won't blog about that right now.)

I hope you will read my blog and share with me some of the things you are doing to help educate our kids.  It's not just about the learning; it's about empathy and kindness.  Knowing how to open the door for a stranger, ask an elderly person if he needs any help with his groceries.  I try to involve my children in lessons that are applicable to real life.

I've been doing this for months, but am only getting around to blogging about it now.  I'll blog about good days and not-so-good days.  Little lessons, big lessons, boring lessons, fun lessons.

Friday was a good day.  We did our reading lesson in the morning.  Sathya went over his "ch" and "sh" sounds.  For our science experiment, we drew a life-size model of Sathya  (on old packing paper) and talked about the digestive system. Esophagus (a roll of paper towel), stomach, a fifteen foot small intestine (leftover yarn from a project years ago), and the large intestine.  No longer will I have to face the question: Amma, where does my food go?

Sathya and Anand also helped with laundry chores and hung up cloth diapers to dry.