Unschooling a 3-year-old: ‘Lesson’ One.
Living rurally and untraditionally, I’ve felt compelled to provide more structure in our day-to-day with intention rather than lessons or daycare. We are privileged and prioritize my staying at home with Clancy, which does not always feel like an easy option. It can be challenging to get through every day of the week and not have moments of stir craziness!
It may be strange to think about implementing ‘lessons’ since June has always marked the end of the school year for me. However, all the end-of-school-year posts have me thinking about how long the summer will be, and Clancy won’t be going to a daycare or preschool this fall.
I know that establishing anything new takes time and trial and error. However, getting loosely started now will allow us to experiment and find a rhythm and purpose weekly. It also has me inspired to find summer events in our community to be involved in or experience!
As a three-year-old boy, Clancy shows interest in counting, physical movement, and hide and seek. He’s obsessed with working hard and all things tractors and construction vehicles; however, he is not interested in tracing or letters.
What am I doing with an active 3-year-old boy?
So far, I have been inspired by the weekly schedule here from Jessi Fearon. We’ve been working on week one, copy and pasted below:
Week 1: Letter “Aa,” the color red, apple projects (apple painting with w/color red and counting with apple slices). Alligator dot activity and “I Spy” outside for things red. Review the Bible story of creation (use the creation wheel to help visual story).
I pulled some activities from Pamm’s House Week 1, too. We incorporated ideas such as learning a couple of sign language cards(“Aa” and “apple”) and renting themed books. Looking at apples and observing what we saw was less attractive to Clancy than utilizing his red toys, such as blocks. He really enjoyed the song below.
Ripe red Apples juicy sweet
(rub your tummy)
Ripe red apples I will eat
(take hand to mouth)
I will shake the apple tree
(pretend to shake)
And let [the] apples fall on me!
(hit your head gently)
The books we rented from the library:
I printed off some fun worksheets to practice tracing and dotting the letter “Aa” and do some “Aa” inspired alligator dot art.
To focus on math, I printed off a sheet of sorted apples. Each problem had two piles of apples. He could pick out the pile that had the most or greatest amount of apples. It was harder for him to comprehend picking the pile with the least amount of apples. We also counted apple slices! I cut five wedges. I narrated simple subtraction as he ate each slice.
A little science lesson naturally evolved by finding Red Clover during our “I Spy” game. We picked one flower to paint with. When we went to paint with it, we noticed bugs coming out of the little flowers on the cone. We identified them as aphids and talked about what aphids ate and what ate them, which happen to be red Ladybugs!
How did week one go?
He tolerated watching me trace the letter “Aa” but said he was “too big” to try himself. I got him dot markers for our themed art projects which he used to fill the dots of the letter “Aa” worksheet. Also, he liked counting apple slices.
He LOVED playing “I Spy” out on the ranch for red things. I made it into a chase/tag sort of game so that he could move his body. We took turns spying on red objects, running at them, and tagging them. When he tagged something that wasn’t red, I only said what color it was and then offered for him to find something else red.
We made a science lesson about finding red clover; aphids were crawling out of it, so we talked about them and how red ladybugs love to eat aphids for snacks!
We aren’t including any Bible study; we haven’t talked about it as a couple.
It is also worth noting that ‘week one’ bled into two weeks as we repeated the same things randomly throughout both weeks. We did not do every activity every day or even an activity every day. However, it did inspire me to look into the community for events that could help create more structure in our week for planning days we focus on lessons. This included discovering that Story Time at our local library was back to in-person on Tuesday and Wednesday. They also have a first-come, first-serve craft pickup right before storytime on Tuesdays. We can easily make that something we do each Tuesday morning. In addition, the library isn’t far from where we pick up our raw milk share; afterward, we can swing by and get it since it is delivered fresh each Monday afternoon!
Little things like that click can help us create a flowing structure or rhythm to our week that really hasn’t existed before.
We can use week two from the above resources to inspire us for our next ‘lesson plan’!
