Homeschool Your Child in Under 1 Hour per Day

How can you teach your child to read, write and do math in under <1 hour per day?

The secret inside Artful Teaching. Joyful Learning.® is an integrated approach - one that folds in literacy and numeracy into everything you do. The program is rooted in a Reggio-inspired approach, and its holistic style is what makes teaching and learning so seamless, streamlined and beautiful.

This blog post and video show a typical "flow" to an ATJL homeschool day, and includes predictable, repeatable rhythms and routines to teach reading, writing and math in a way that's playful, engaging and research-based.

Morning Meeting ~ 15 minutes

Morning meeting is a practice used in most early childhood classrooms, and for good reason! It's a beautiful way to teach reading and writing in a way that doesn't require much planning or headspace. Here's how.

1. Morning Message: A daily message written to your child with a rotating bank of 5 literacy strategies. Your child "fixes" the message, using skills like: fill in the missing sound, finding small words, making words and more. 

2. Poem, Rhyme, Song: Daily phonemic awareness sets the foundation for any strong literacy program. Songs, poems and fingerplays are a playful way to get your child moving and active, and a great way to play with words (rhyming, sound substitution, syllabication...)

3. Read Aloud: Choose a high quality read aloud that pairs with the Table Time invitation. This gets our kids prior knowledge fired up, and brains ready and excited to learn more.

Table Time Invitation ~ 30 minutes

The hands-on, artful exploration time. This is the FUN and playful part of the day, where we explore a concept through the child's one hundred languages. Collage, painting, sculpture, wire, plasticine, puppet-making, storytelling, poetry, bookmaking, building and design... there are so many wonderful ways to explore curricular concepts through the language of art and play.

Self-portraits is an example beautiful invitation that ties into the study of self inside Social Studies Exploring oneself through collage, drawing, painting, sculpture, and later writing an "All-About Me" autobiography is a wonderful way to reach social studies objectives*, writing objectives*, and gives kids a stimulating hands-on experience that will engage them independently and keep them interested for an extended period of time.

*Social Studies Objectives: students explore who they are in relation to others in their world. They become aware of how people live, play, and work together in order to meet their basic needs. Students are encouraged to express interest in the experiences of others and discover their connections to the people around them.

*Languages Arts Objectives: students describe and enhance own drawings, stories, and writing; use drawings and labels to express ideas, feelings, and information

Play Time

While I don't count play time as "instructional time," it is an integral part of any early years home education. Getting our kids involved in deep, immersive, nurturing play is part of the ATJL way of life, and affords you the time to do the mom stuff that needs doing: laundry, meal prep, housework, work-work. Play is your child's birthright, and this is the time they are making sense of all the learning that is happening. 

Table Time Invitation to Learn ~ 15 minutes

Math and Literacy rhythms are the daily instruction and practice of skills such as printing, phonics, word families, spelling, addition, subtraction etc. These are offered as repeatable activities (no planning and minimal prep) and ready to go inside the program. We simply pull out one of the activities and go!

Teaching the Early Years requires very little - but if we are to be intentional and purposeful about our learning goals (teaching our kids to read, write and do math in a systematic way) - then we need a plan.

The ATJL curriculum provides a beautifully laid out, organized plan for learning each day so that you can enjoy what matters most - your child, and the memories you'll make together. Not the scrambling last minute for supplies and ideas, poring over Pinterest,  piece-mealing activities together without rhyme or reason. 

If you want to homeschool with confidence, ease and contagious creativity (saving you hours of time, energy and unneeded resources) then join us inside this one-of-a-kind program today! Enrollment closes Thursday, May 4, 2023.