Starting our Homeschool Journey

Does your 4yr old also tell you he ate that hours ago in the night yesterday? (And be referring to something he had 30min ago, same day, in the afternoon)?

Here’s my solution to reinforce the concept of time in reference to days/months/years/time of day.

My focus is time of day right now, not so much months and years. But not in focus doesn’t mean we omit entirely. In fact, this one task takes care of recognizing numbers, letters, rows, weather, and the idea of “next” all in one for us. Many days it’s the closest we come to any kind of schooling but I’d say we cover a lot.

First, he has to move the little green magnet to the next box. (Aka next day). It took us a few months to really solidify what is “next”.

Then, the whole all in one lesson: I ask him to read me the column heading. This requires knowing what is a “column” then following it up and identifying letters there. Ex: today it was “s”, “a”, “t”, etc.

Then he tells me the number next to the green marker “date”, identifies the letters in the month. And I tell him the year.

He looks outside to tell me the weather.

And looks at where the sun is to tell me the time of day. Is it waking up? Getting brighter? Is the sun high in the sky? Or is it getting darker and the sun is going down? At night... do you see the moon and stars?

As the day goes on, I call him over to ask if it’s still afternoon? did it turn into morning? Is it cooling down and darkening outside? Is the moon there? If there is a change, he moves the large circle magnet on the whiteboard down to the next time of day.

As a bonus, we see what the moon is doing. Yesterday we saw the thin sliver of a crescent. He knows every night it will slowly grow bigger until it’s full. It’s a long time between full moons. Almost a month.