In early March as news of the first COVID-19 case in NYC was reported, I started thinking about resources we would need to marshal in order to keep Mr. Action occupied at home. How to homeschool your toddler was a question I never thought I would have to think about – he’s in daycare for crying out loud! There was still hope back then that contact tracing would save the day, so my orders were small: some leaf rubbing plates for coloring, a set of items that provided practice in opening and shutting mechanisms, some pull-back wooden race cars. Well, those orders have gotten much larger as time has gone by, especially since our daycare is now forecast to be shut through the end of 2020 and we’re not sure when it will open in 2021. I can’t complain though – as bleak as some days are, this is the life I had hoped to live (minus the 24/7 presence of both husband and son). The upside to this madness is giving Mr. Action a forest school and Montessori-based learning approach on our terms and completely in line with what interests Mr. Action. Below, our action plan for how to homeschool a toddler while working from home.
Our Schedule
While the most time-consuming, we prioritize outdoor time in our home and are out twice a day. Apart from breaking our own monotony, being outdoors has allowed us to give Mr. Action a nature-based childhood which was always something out of reach when he was at daycare (ours didn’t have outdoor space and caregivers didn’t have enough time to venture to the nearby parks). Mr. Action really loves identifying birds by sight and sound, spotting flowers on our strolls, and generally watching the world go by. For the next few months, we will be focused on the following themes: leaves, trees, autumn/seasons, and the moon.
While our neighborhood isn’t charming, it is one of the most convenient areas in NYC regardless of COVID, and we are in walking distance of four parks and seven playgrounds. I am so grateful to have the chance to alternate destinations on my walks, and NYC has some of the best playgrounds anywhere in the world – particularly in the water features department. Our schedule roughly looks like this:
- 830 – wakeup
- 915 – breakfast
- 10-1030 – circle time with daycare friends (sing-a-long, perpetual calendar showcase, story time, and dance party)
- 1045-12 – play date in pod
- 1230- lunch
- 115-3 – nap
- 330-5 – learning time (reading, numbers/shapes, 3-part cards, sensory play, art project)
- 5 -snack
- 530-7 – park or playground run
- 730 – dinner
- 8 – TV time (about 20 minutes)
I’ll let you in on a secret and share that our son is basically a teenager. He has never been a long sleeper and always fell on the lower range of total sleep hours. Since 18 months, he has plateaued and requires 12 hours a day of total rest – a 90 minute or sometimes two hour nap in the afternoon followed by a waking stretch of 7 hours which means, yes, he sleeps at 10 at night. There are many parents who would be horrified at this, but if you look at the schedule, our alternative would be to either drop his nap or shorten it, neither of which has been successful in the past. So we play the hand we were dealt. And we continue to homeschool our toddler while working from home.
Resources
Compared to when I was growing up in the 80s, there is so much more in the way of amazing things for kids these days and I basically save our budget to vicariously experience an idealized version of my childhood. We have a predominantly wooden toy household because we can’t stand the loud beeps and sounds of many plastic items, but we make an exception for things like Bruder trucks which are so realistic that you can somewhat forgive the astronomical pricing on the imported items (make friends with Germans if you can, so they can bring them over when travel resumes). We also love a set of building pebbles that we have which are coated in a smooth type of rubber. If you want to homeschool your toddler while working from home, it’s clearly one of the best times to do so given the quality and range of resources available
It’s no secret that you may have to actually model independent play for young kids and coach them into it. Mr. Action still likes when someone sits and works on an activity with him, but we are getting more and more uninterrupted time with him as he has learned to amuse himself with what has been left out on the IKEA media console which has been surprisingly perfect as a Montessori-type low shelf. His MuTable sits next to the console which allows him to start playing with whatever strikes his fancy.
The resources that we have found most helpful to allow for longer stretches of independent play between the ages of 2 and 2.5 are:
- Sensory play (water beads have been a total hit, any baking soda and vinegar experiment is magic, and he loves hunting through yarn with chopsticks for hidden items; play with noisy base fillers like beans is also satisfying)
- Musical Books (The Story Orchestra Series and the Welcome to the Symphony Series are amazing)
- Art supplies (we love items from Stockmar, Prang, and Faber Castell)
- Perpetual wooden calendar (Mirus Toys has an excellent one)
- Grapat loose parts
- Brio trains
- Grimms rainbow and blocks for marble runs
- Wall mounted easel (crucial for small apartments)
- Bruder trucks
- Puzzles (we love Crocodile Creek and Eeboo)
- Melissa and Doug kitchen utensils/pots and Erzi wooden food (the most realistic! they are so amazing and they have the kinds that you can chop up which he loves because they also stick together to other items)
- Wobbel Board
From what we’ve noticed these past six months, Mr. Action really thrives on routines and limited activities. Less is more and they are happiest when they have another human doing something with them. A huge amount of our budget has gone towards books, and while we typically would have either used the library or bought used, COVID-19 has once again upended the normal way of doing things. Media Mail apparently results in theft or non-arrival quite frequently these days (some perpetrators go so far as to steal individual books out of a box!), so rather than be disappointed, we have chosen to buy from our local bookseller when the price differential to Amazon is 10% or less. If the price differential is more than 10%, then yes, we go through Amazon. Happily, my observation has been that I have been able to spread our money around equitably given our order volume, and we then re-sell through the local parents’ group, so this is how we try to minimize late-stage Capitalism’s rot.
Curricula
We follow the Blossom and Root early years curriculum and complement it with Exploring Nature with Children. We also do select activities from the Busy Toddler curriculum and round things out with process art activities (The Artful Parent and Play Make Create are great resources). We don’t do everything in the curricula and don’t stick to the recommended timeframes either as Mr. Action can zip through things or lose interest fairly rapidly. We also take many breaks as life must go on. Meetings and deliverables still need to be managed and really, our goal at this age is to have maximum one hour of exposure to new concepts/activities in a day. The rest Mr. Action gets to spend truly playing and being bored. To homeschool your toddler, don’t be afraid to pull from multiple curricula.
Working Parenthood
How do we get any work done you ask? Yes, this is the sucky part. To homeschool your toddler means work gets done late at night (10-midnight), at nap time, and before he wakes. It means constantly thinking about how to approach things while on walks or at the playground, and it means some intense meeting division during the actual work day. For me, it is knowing that of all the times in my life, this is the one where I cannot have anything close to balance and the only way to assuage that guilt is to pick sides. I choose Mr. Action’s future, my future, and our marriage – whatever activities allow for growth for all of us will trump everything else. I have not cooked much at all for the last six months and have preferred to outsource this activity (thankfully, we can). Between managing the toy tornado daily and playing/educating, it means that our house is usually in a constant state of disarray and that is the tradeoff. There will be no Instagram worthy pictures from our house except for first thing in the morning and after Mr. Action is asleep. The ugly truth is that balls will be dropped and you must choose which ones to lay down for the time being so that you don’t have any guilt about the dropped ball to begin with.
These times call for some serious magical thinking. But more importantly:
Deal with the world as it is, not as you want it to be, or you wish it to be, or how you think it should be
For me, this has meant no more excessive worrying about the future and really leaning into taking things one day or at most one week at a time. Circumstances are constantly evolving. I write as a new nanny arrangement is taking place in our play date pod and as the excruciating heat of summer is giving way to fall. We will have to readjust our second outing time again, and we will have to teach Mr. Action to take on new activities from the ones he has loved so much over these past few months. As slow as things are in COVID time, they also require constant adaption.
These are some of the hardest and also some of the most rewarding times that I’ve lived through. I have however very much enjoyed being able to homeschool our toddler. There are days where I truly cannot understand what the point is of continuing. They happen cyclically and never go away. They strike at random times when I shouldn’t even be so ungrateful. But that is the nature of full-time parenting with no breaks – we tire easily and must take time -outs to restore and ground ourselves. For those who are able to send their kids back to school or daycare – I envy you. And I hope that our time will come for some breathing room as well.
