Our Homeschooling Journey: Teaching my Toddler to Write

It's been a month since I started teaching my daughter how to write. I stumbled upon a free writing workbook from The Relaxed Homeschool, a facebook page I started to follow when my husband finally agreed to homeschool our daughter.

Introducing Writing

I have actually introduced writing to her a long time ago. My initial target was to get her to grip the pencil properly. The first steps I did was to have her hold crayons. I bought her those jumbo crayons so she won't easily break them. I had her doodle on papers.

Then we levelled up to paint brushes. Thanks to our good friend @tpkidkai.
Then I went ahead and had her use my color pens to see if she can pinch grip smaller markers. I wanted her to use colorful markers so she'd still see serious writing as a fun thing to do.

Taking writing seriously

The first lesson on the workbook I got was writing her name. It took us a couple of days - almost two weeks - before she was able to write her name.

I almost gave up because it seemed like she only want to write certain letters and wouldn't want to write others. But with perseverance, and a lot of patience, I got her to write her name.

Study Time

I needed her to remember and understand that there's a time for everything. That there's a time to play, a time to sleel, a time to eat. And now that we are going to homeschool her, I introduced her to study time. I needed to make it her habit to study so I set her study time early in the morning.

At first she was reluctant. All she wanted was playtime. So, I made playtime a reward for her after we finish study time. As soon as we wake up, we would go to the study table and start with our lessons. It worked out very well for us. She would study because she wants her playtime. But it turned out she only wants to get over her study time so she could play.

I was at that dilemma when one day, I wasn't feeling super when I woke up. I couldn't get up from bed yet so I told her she could go ahead and play first, we will have our study time once I can get up. She was more energetic and enthisiastic during our study time after 30 minutes of playtime.

Her writing progress

At first she wants me to hold her hand while writing. She said she needed my help so she cn write. That was from A to D. Now that we're at letter E, she wouldn't let me hold her hand anymore. "I can do it myself, Teacher Nanay. I don't need your help." She calls me teacher during our study time. And it both breaks but warms my heart knowing that she wants to start doing some stuff on her own.

_{She wrote those in black ink by herself. I did not even need to shoe her how to write it. She just copied my writing.}

Oh well, that's the dilemma of parenthood. We want to train them to not need our help when they grow up but deep inside our hearts, we also want to always be there for them.

Lesson plan

I did not start with lesson plans when we started our serious study time mode. But now that we're in the middle of it, I observed that she likes it when she knows what we will be studying about on our next session. It kind of gives her heads up and something to look forward to. So at the end of our lesson, we would summarize what we learned and I would let her know what our lesson for tomorrow will be. The next day, she would remind me what we will be studying about.

At first, instilling a habit looked difficult. But I am learning that listening to my kid, watching her cues, observing her closely would guide me to how we could both achieve our homeschooling targets.