Taylored 5-Minute Learning

I am Taylored Learning Mom, creator of Taylored 5-Minute Learning. I'm just a mother who's natural parenting style happens to involve either finding or creating tailored learning opportunities for my kids. All children are unique, with their own strengths, struggles, and aptitudes for different subjects, and I found that creating and doing learning activities/mini lessons with my kids that can be adjusted or tailored to their current level has become a hobby of mine. 

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My husband and I have two boys. Our eldest is nicknamed "Little Mr." and our youngest "Copycat", for always copying exactly what his big brother does right afterwards!

 

I've taught college kids rather than toddlers before, and though I've never really thought about homeschooling, I found that my natural way of parenting consisted of wanting to find educational activities to do with my kids to do my best to prepare them for school. Just before our Little Mr. turned 3, I came across Children Learning Reading, a program claiming to be able to teach kids as young as 2 years old to read using just 5 minutes, 3 times a day of your time. Curious, I tried their techniques in their trial offer and was so impressed with it already working with a 2 year old Little Mr. that I bought their full program, and our Little Mr. was reading independently by the time he was 3 and a half!

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That experience inspired me to see what else I could teach my toddlers using the 5-minute-a-day model. Before Little Mr. turned 5, he hadn't been to any sort of school yet, but in addition to already being able to read, he knew his numbers up to 1000, could keep track of which day of the week it was, how to count in 2s, 5s, 10s and 100s, play chess, tell time, and bike. At the time, he was also working on math, spelling, writing, playing piano, and figuring out paths for his coding robots. All by just spending about 20 minutes each morning on three or four different 5-minute learning activities, 5 minutes on one learning activity in the afternoon, and playing whatever he wants the rest of the day (this is just our latest routine, you can choose whatever routine works for your family). 

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From past experience, what you learn when you're a kid makes learning related things as an adult easier. As a toddler, I could speak Filipino, which is very similar to Spanish. This made learning Spanish in high school easier for me as it was so familiar. My husband taught himself how to program at the age of 7, and as an adult, coding and learning any new programming language is second nature to him. So my goal for teaching my kids a variety of skills as toddlers is to expose them to as many concepts as I can, so that when they get to learning more challenging subjects later, hopefully related things come more naturally and easily to them. Toddlers are like sponges for information, so I wanted to take advantage of their quick learning by systematically introducing a variety of concepts to them that will hopefully give them a head start with their future academic subjects.

 

I'm starting to do the same for our Copycat as I've done for our Little Mr. and I wanted a way to record what I was doing with the Little Mr. at his current age so that I didn't forget by the time our Copycat is ready a couple of years from now. So I created Taylored 5-Minute Learning as my notes of the activities that worked well with my first son. These skills and activities are very, very simple, but it was difficult to remember everything I'd done in my head, and while writing it out I came to the realization that there's more thought and explanation required than I initially realized, so hopefully this site can be a resource for you that I wish I had when looking for educational activities for my toddlers.

 

Sometimes I would continue on with a 5-minute activity solely because I didn't want to have to try and think up the next step. Sometimes it was obvious, and other times it required more thinking. So with the 5-minute activities all laid out, it will be easier when my youngest son is old enough to do these activities as I don't have to re-figure out what worked before - I can just look it up. I figured a website would be a great way to not only record what I've done for Little Mr., but also let other busy parents know about the 5-minute-a-day idea and the quick educational activities that have worked for us in case they wanted ideas for ready-made, easy, fast, and educational activities for their kids that they'd like to try or modify for themselves.

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I hope these learning activities and mini lessons help your kids as much as they've helped mine! Enjoy!