Fitting Learning Time Into Your Day Part 3

Part Three of this series is for...
Parents Who Work Full-Time while their kids are at school or daycare

For Part One of the Fitting Learning Time Into Your Day series, click here. For Part Two of this series, click here. 


So when do full-time working parents with children who are at school or daycare find time to do learning activities? All of the ideas below are great opportunities for learning. They require a lot of parental patience, but then again, so do most daily activities.

Mealtime! 

Though it may be aggravating, let your child help prepare meals. On busy weeknights, even a young child can help tear lettuce, stir, pour, or arrange toppings. On weekends, maybe he can assist with pancakes, omelets, or even grilling out. Cooking activities provide practice with math (measuring, fractions), manual dexterity, safety precautions, creative expression, language arts (reading recipes), life skills, and generally learning to be a helpful person. You just have to be willing to let your little chef get into the process. 

During dinner, you could use conversation papers in a jar. One family member gets to draw a slip of paper on which you have all written ideas for family dinner conversation. As parents, you can make sure that the educational topics you want to cover are in the jar.

If you want to do some geography or history during dinner, post maps or time lines on the walls around the dinner table and talk about those. If you have younger children, you could post ABCs, numbers, colors, or shapes, and sing the ABC song before or after the start of dinner.

Field Trips

Weekends are precious time for full-time working parents. They can also be completely taken over by sporting events, grocery shopping, cleaning, and maintenance around the house. Make any of your planned events into a learning field trip by:


1. Researching what you are going to do
2. Making lists to prepare for the event
3. Using The Notebooking Fairy's field trip learning worksheet to record what your child wants to learn, already knows, and ends up learning
4. Mapping the route
5. Taking pictures 

and/or

6. Putting together a quick scrapbook of the event.


These steps can work for everything from a grocery shopping trip to a miniature golf outing to a traditional road trip. In fact, a backyard camp-out could be planned the same way for an economical, time-saving, and easy family event.

Bedtime

I bet many parents feel like I do at the children's bedtime: I could go to sleep myself, and appreciate the opportunity more than they do! However, this is a key time of day to connect with your child about the events of the day, feelings, planning the next day, and reading or storytelling. There are fabulous resources available to help parents plan read-alouds, teach children about chores and organizing themselves for the next day, and learn effective ways of talking about emotions. I will be posting more about my favorite resources for these learning activities in future posts.

TV Time

There are families (including mine) who sometimes find themselves sharing family time in front of the TV. Turn the "idiot box" into something slightly more like a "learning box" by choosing quality programming such as Nature specials, Nova science specials, your family's treasured videos, and PBS children's shows. 

In fact, for some "physical education," families with a Nintendo Wii could get in some rainy-day exercise together by playing the sports games. I don't have experience with this because my children are a bit too young and we don't have a Wii, but any kind of mental or physical exercise can balance out some of TV's negative aspects just a bit. 

As soon as your children are old enough, begin to teach about the purpose of commercials and how commercials are made. You could go in depth and have each family member create a commercial. Help them think critically about what commercials are trying to get them to do.


Bottom line: If you know your family is going to be watching TV anyway, make that time count for something positive.


Bottom bottom line: I am sure working parents are already doing these types of activities with their children. The trick is to be as mindful as possible about the time you are spending.