by Nathan Perkins

Created on: July 27, 2011   Last Updated: July 28, 2011

Here are some things that you can do with your younger child, to occupy him or her while you homeschool your older child.

1.  Educational activities and toys

Give your child something educational to do.  They can learn while you are otherwise detained.  To capitalize on this strategy, ask your younger child about what he or she did and what they learned from the activity.

Some educational activities that may suit your younger child include refrigerator magnate alphabets.  Challenge the child to spell words that are at his or her level.  Or have your child order them alphabetically.  You could remove some letters and ask them to figure out what letters are missing.

Another refrigerator idea includes a magnet marble maze.  You can see what I’m talking about at this link, http://cgi.ebay.com/FRIGITS-REFRIGERATOR-MARBLE-MAZE -TOY-EUC-/150591126654 .

It really pays off to purchase a typing game that your children can play on the computer.  There are games for all ages that will help with typing.  If they learn how to type playing a game, they will have a great head start when they are ready to type words and type papers. 

There are many free typing games online.  I played a couple games to try them out from, www.freetypinggame.net/play.asp.  They were fun and will teach your children how to locate the keys on the keyboard.

Buy some colored sticker and ask your young child to go around the house and place a sticker on everything they can find that starts with a certain letter or that is a certain color.

Younger children can enjoy some crafts for hours.  When I taught my six year old how to make friendship bracelets, it was hard to get him to do other things.

2.  Involve them in the educating of your older children.

This may sound difficult, but there are some instances where it works well.  Younger children may not understand science experiments but may enjoy watching them.  They are also likely to ask good questions.  You may want to encourage them to ask questions about the experiment for your older child to try to answer.

 If your older child is writing a paper, have your younger child try to read what the older child wrote.  Have your younger child illustrate your older child’s paper.  For fun, you may want to let your younger child give the older child a grade on certain work.  Younger children may be able to help your older child with

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