Winter Snuggles

Don't you love winter on those days that you do not have to leave your home?

My husband has returned to work after paternity leave. That leaves me back home with our son for the next month. Now that Baby E is 3 months old, he is awake for 1.5 hours at a time. This is the perfect time to introduce him to a variety of topics and activities.

I plan on gently "teaching" him.

This was a great thought before baby arrived. I did all this work to modify tot school programs and then forgot all about it until last week. I found that I placed Baby E in the swing or on the floor while I read my book of the month. He began to grunt and only stopped when I looked up at him.

My baby wanted attention!

I put the book down, scooped him and read a baby book to him. He enjoyed it and I enjoyed the look on his face. That is when I remembered all the work I had put in the year before to create a Tot/Baby home learning program. I printed our schedule, gathered all the baby books for this age onto two book shelves and pulled out the nursery rhyme and poem books.

This is the best Winter Snuggles!

Two years ago, I purposefully sought out Tot homeschool programs and modified my favorites to meet our desires. We want to introduce our son to music, nursery rhymes, books, stories, puppetry and much more. We didnt want to wait until he was 2 years old to begin reading books during the day.

So how do we do this?

Simply,
We sing a song or nursery rhyme while changing him.
We play a hand game like "This Little Piggy" and say a poem while he is awake.
We introduce new words with examples throughout the day.
We play music while eating or in the evening.
We read two books daily; one in the morning and one in the evening.

Each of these can be done every day or you can pick which ones you want to do on each day. Twice a month we rotate the songs, books, the vocab and music. This allows us to introduce different topics and have a variety of experiences with him. Use your library, swap books with a friend.

It isn't strict. 

Some days babies dont want to comply and that is alright. Today is one of those days. All he wanted to do was roll on the floor. He didnt want to sit with me without whining. Tomorrow may be different. We would have to see.

Book titles are not as important as the act of reading to him. One day I used a magazine because I wanted to read it and the colorful pages caught his attention.

I did not make this up! I did not come up with this idea!

This is old school stuff people. My mother did something similar with my brother and I when we were babies. She followed the seasons and read us tons of books and did activities to match. Check out this site where a older mother created a similar program for her babies.