home education

as most of you will know I recently had a baby. My other two babies are 16 and 12. daughter is doing really well at college and son is doing ok at secondary school. I was a classroom assistant for 5 years and am a bit disappointed with the classroom teachings these days. I would like to educate Libby at home but not full time. I think school is a good social building exercise. I have enrolled her in baby sign language starting in May (she will be 5 months). I hope to teach her a bit about loads of stuff (not exactly Einstein myself) including reading writing colours, baking, construction (I will be using toilet roll tubes) all about animals and different countries (unfortunately cant afford to visit them)

I know she is young just now but I would like to read up about how babies/toddlers learn etc before she gets there.

Has anyone had experience of home educating? Any good books I could read?

there may be something here http://www.babycentre.co.uk/search/?query=home+teaching thats relevant, not too sure as not had a proper look through...

signing a good idea....camerons not talking properly yet so at least doing the basics like "drink" "food/hungry" and "wet nappy" through signingis a big help!

[pookie]

Baby signing is very good..I took my son to tinytalk which is a signing group to start off. They do songs and increase your vocab.. for my daughter we just did it ourselves.

[dizzyblonde]

Do everything you can before she is Four. It was something an old friend told me, many many years ago. His daughter didn't have telly, xboxes etc to draw her attention, but Gary and Sophies mum packed everything in. She tuned into a very very intelligent lass.
I took it on board and before Dylan got to school could count to god knows where, write, knew his colours, shapes etc etc. Just the basics...I thought. Apparently, as you'd expect a child learns everything before the age of four(don't know why that age) walking, talking for example, so everything you can get in stays in. So when they get to school age its all secondary. Needless to say what I hav done in his early years has given him a good start, as now at seven, he is top of the class in maths, science and has the reading age of a nine year old. The three teachers so far in school say he will never find education a difficult thing, and is likely to be very academic.


He does have two left feet though, he'll never be a world class footballer