A common misconception that parents have is that learning at home means hours on workbooks. Wrong! Students don't learn solely on workbooks in school. When homeschooling, why would students do the same?
While fifteen minutes of workbook activities at a time for preschool and kindergarten age kids are good (in various activities, such as fine motor control, drawing with details, learning shapes, and coloring within the lines) you want to ensure education is fun and play-based. You don't want to fatigue your children, mentally.
I highly recommend old fashioned Legos for kids. They are versatile and will set up your kids when they learn future concepts.
I started my kids on Legos early. They were already stacking and breaking apart oversized Duplo blocks by the time they were one.
As my children learned to count, I had them count the number of blocks.
By the time my daughter was four, she was practicing Common Core math concepts and fundamentals for future science concepts. This is how I did it.
I chose blocks of all the same size. I made a tower of two blocks and asked my daughter how many bricks were in that stack.
She initially counted. One. Two.
I verbally acknowledged her correct response.
I kept the stack there and used two more bricks on the other side. She counted them again.
I combined the two stacks. She told me four. I made another stack of two. She counted from the beginning. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Great.
I combined the stacks. She counted to make sure. I added to more, and she counted to confirm her belief. I separated the eight blocks into two even stacks of four. She counted them to confirm they were eight. I separated them into four even stacks. She counted. I combined them.
She no longer needed to count.
No matter how I separated or combined, conservation of mass persisted. Congratulations.
Your toddler has now started to understand an advanced physics concept, and Number Sense, which is a Common Core Math standard that will set them up for being successful when learning addition and subtraction.
I started moving some of the stacks behind each other so that she isn't able to see all the bricks. She no longer needed to count them. She knew they existed.
I stopped there. I will reinforce the same concept with another base number the next day. By doing this every day, she will develop strong foundations that will allow her to be successful in her schooling career.
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