Sample Routines
These Taylored 5-Minute Learning activities will be most effective if you build them into your routine. Not only will your child get many opportunities to practice and get many repetitions in, but they will also be less difficult because they will both expect and look forward to it.
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Since becoming a mom, I've always preferred schedules without set times associated with them. When you have babies and toddlers to care for, there's always one thing or another that will frequently result in things not getting done at the planned time. So instead, my schedules / routines have a list of things to do one after the other: when you're done with one, then move onto the next without worrying about what time it is. This flexibility was especially great for mini lessons or learning activities because you could spend a few more minutes on one activity if your child was enjoying it or struggling with a concept, or move on already if you're done quicker than expected.
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Below are the routines that have worked for our family. You can see how we started with 1 activity and then slowly added more as my toddler got older with a longer attention span. If you want to try 5-minute learning for yourself, hopefully these can give you an idea of how you can fit one or more activities or mini lessons into your own routine! By no means do you need to do this many activities - for example, if I was just interested in having my child be able work on their piano playing skills, then I'd only be interested in scheduling in that one 5-minute session every day or every other day, as in the "Example Routine: 1 activity a day". Just pick whatever skill(s) you'd like your child to excel in and focus your time on that!
KEY:
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Colored boxes:
5-minute activity
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Colored italics:
Favored parts of existing routine
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Black font:
Usual parts of all toddler routines
Daily Routine examples:​
1) 1 activity, 3 times a day
(~15 mins a day spent on 5-minute learning activities)
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Here is the first routine we had before I had even thought of the concept of Taylored 5-Minute Learning. In this case, we were doing Jim Yang's Children Learning Reading program that had us doing three 5-minute lessons a day. We have a bar height dining table, so we kept our toddlers in booster seats probably longer than most simply because our dining chairs were higher than usual. The upside to this was that our kids were motivated to get their reading done after eating so that they could get unbuckled to go down and play!
2) 1 activity, 2 times a day
(~10 mins a day spent on 5-minute learning activities)
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After finishing Jim's Reading program, I adjusted his 5-minute learning time to reading progressively more sentences/paragraphs. Because he was reading more per 5 minutes, I reduced his activities down to 2 times per day.
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He also wasn't in a booster seat anymore, so keeping him motivated to do his reading was a little more challenging. Our schedule already consisted of one movie a day and a daily ice pop (something we continued after potty training to help keep him hydrated as we had a hard time getting him to drink enough at the time). So I just scheduled his activities before these things he really wanted: that way, he was consistently motivated to get his activities done.
3) 3 activities, 1 time a day each:
(~15 mins a day spent on 5-minute learning activities)
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The Little Mr.'s reading was already so good that I wanted to branch out and see if we could start learning other skills. A silver lining to the pandemic was that my husband was working from home, so I could focus on teaching the Little Mr. to bike while the Copycat was napping. After biking, the Little Mr. would take his nap, and do another activity before he chose his one movie for the day.
Weekly Routine examples:​
1) 5 activities (3 daily, 2 alternating), 1 time a day each:
(~20 mins a day spent on 5-minute learning activities)
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The Little Mr. was so lucky to get so many educational presents for his birthday thanks to his awesome grandparents, great grandparents, aunts and uncles. I combined his reading stamina activity with his bedtime reading, which freed up more time during the day for other activities and mini lessons. Initially I tried fitting all 5 mini lessons into one day, to do everyday, and that did not work - I really pushed the Little Mr.'s attention span to his limits! But I found this to be a happy balance: not only was he more present for the activities as we did everything within his attention span, but the variety of activities and mini lessons helped keep him interested too.
2) 7 activities (1 daily, 1 weekly, 5 alternating), 1 time a day each:
(~25-30 mins a day spent on 5-minute learning activities)
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Here's our current schedule. Right now we spend about 15 minutes in the morning doing our 2-3 morning activities or mini lessons. I've grouped the short ones in the "3 morning activity" days and the ones that can sometimes take longer than 5 minutes in the "2 morning activity" days. The kids and I then unload the dishwasher together, and afterwards the Little Mr. does his Elephant Math Learning program, which he chooses to do for longer than 10 minutes sometimes. Because this is his favorite activity we do it after chores, as well as every day of the week. The only other activity is after naptime, before their one video of the day. All other parts of the day, the Little Mr. is doing whatever he wants.
