Charlotte Mason called the years before formal school lessons the “early years.” She believed this time was a special time for children to form relationships with themselves, family members, and the world around them. And current research continually supports this idea. This should not be a time for academics. It is a time for something much more important. What could more important than academics? Listen to this episode to find out what your infants, toddlers, and preschoolers actually need for optimum development and a solid foundation for future academics.

Transcript

00:13 –
In this episode we are going to talk about the years from birth to six years old, otherwise known as the early years. And, in case you didn’t notice, I have a little three-month-old here who’s going to give us some background sounds to listen to while I talk about this stage.

It’ll be kind of special.

01:01
So let’s take a look at children from birth to six years old. Infants are born with very little muscle control, poor eyesight, but a universal ear for language. They can distinguish differences in phonemes better than adults and if they are exposed to a language before 10 months old, they will grow up to speak that language without an accent. Children learn how to understand a language easily in two years and can speak fluently after three to four years. They not only learn to comprehend the language, but they must learn how to produce sound, coordinating their vocal cords, tongue and lips. Their brain is born with trillions of neural connections, many more than they actually need. Their brain prunes those connections that are not used. Sensory input is especially important at this stage, as it strengthens many of the synapses and creates a lot of connections. This is probably why babies are so driven to touch, taste and smell everything, as relas respond to every sound they hear. Infants learn how to control their body by trial and error. They hit a mobile toy and try to replicate it again and again. They practice over and over. They do the same thing for grasping, throwing and bringing food to their mouth. It is truly amazing how much they accomplish all on their own in two years and when you think about it, they learn a language. They learn how to use the most complex, I guess, piece of machinery the body all on their own, without any lessons from adults.

02:42
During the toddler and the teenage years, the limbic system goes through some major developments and refinements, and this comes with a lot of emotional ups and downs. They are learning eternal and earthly laws. It may not seem like they want boundaries, but they do. They are constantly testing and pushing boundaries to see where those boundaries are. They are learning who they are and what they can do and what they should do. Charlotte Mason said that children need to know who they are. In other words, I am, what they are capable of, I can, what they should do, I ought and then to control their will or self-discipline, I will and that is the motto for her schools was I am, I can, I ought, I will. And I feel like this is probably the most important thing that kids will learn during this stage is who they are, what they can do, what they should do, and then learning how to control that.

03:48
What does society or, I guess, our culture say that children need during this stage? Well, looking through magazines, articles on the internet, instagram and Pinterest, I found that really it comes down to five things. People believe that this stage, they need socialization with their peers, lots of playtime with kids. They need to be reading by six years old, they need to sit still and wait turns Very important things that kids need to learn during this stage. They need curated activities, things to keep them busy and you see a lot of these on Pinterest and Instagram and even YouTube and they need professional educators.

04:37
In contrast to that, what did Charlotte Mason say about this stage, and I’m just going to use some direct quotes here from her books, as well as articles in her parents’ magazines? She said in this time of extraordinary pressure, educational and social, which, as a side note, is interesting that they felt educational pressure back in Victorian England. So educational and social. Perhaps a mother’s first duty to her children is to secure for them a quiet growing time, a full six years of passive, receptive life, the waking part of it spent for the most part out in the fresh air, and this not for the gain in bodily health alone. Body and soul, heart and minds are nourished with food convenient for them, when the children are, let alone let to live without friction and without stimulus, amongst happy influences which incline them to be good. And that was in Home Education, which is her first volume.

05:41
And this quote that I’m going to read is from an article called Children Up to School Age by Elsie Kitching. When lessons should begin showing signs of a lack of vitality or a want of concentration, he should still enjoy the nursery freedom. He should still have occupations but not lessons. I’m going to come back to those two quotes because there’s so much wisdom in that, and I’m going to break them down into what we can do during these first six years of life, but before I do I’m going to talk about what research shows about this stage. So I talked about what society or culture says that kids this age need, and I talked about what Charlotte Mason said that kids this age need. Now I’m going to look at actual research done on children this age and what they actually need. All the data and conclusions that I’m going to share with you is from a book called School Can Wait by Raymond C Moore.

06:51
Dr Moore was a developmental psychologist. His resume is enormous and I’m only going to put part of it here. It includes public school teacher, principal superintendent, college dean and president, as well as an officer for the US Office of Education and an advisor to the White House. It is truly amazing his experience in education and government. Interestingly, because of his experiences and training in developmental psychology, he is a huge advocate of home education. He and his wife educated their own children at home and he started a foundation which its goal is to help teach parents how to teach their children at home. So as a psychologist and college dean, he is well-equipped to read research and understand what makes a study high quality or not. He began looking at all the studies he could find on early childhood development and education to understand what prepares children for the demands of academics in school Between him and his associates of the Moore Foundation.

08:03
They conducted a broad investigation of over 7,000 sources in early childhood education research. They only took the studies that qualified as quality research, meaning that there was the right amount of study participants, that the methods were good and that the interpretation was reliable. So out of all those 7,000, they ended up with about a thousand that were analyzed and included in his book. There were five authors, including his wife. Him and his wife were the main authors and then they had three more people that helped. So they looked at the trends and trends of these studies instead of individual studies. Now you see a lot of books and articles that are written on about one study and maybe it was a good study. Most of them usually are high quality, but they’re just looking at one.

08:59
This book is looking at trends of those thousand studies. In other words, they were looking for truth, not fishing for studies that supported their particular belief. I love what he says in the preface to this book. He said In analyzing literature for the facts and trends and pointing out relationships between them, a scholar is, of of course, obligated to maintain a regard for truth, to examine information honestly, he must be alert for clues from any source that may lead to further knowledge. It is obviously unscholarly, unethical and unwise to wave aside a possible truth because it does not agree with presently accepted knowledge or conventional practice. I love it. I just love how honest, intelligent and truly scientific Dr Moore was.

09:55
So what did he and his team find after analyzing so many research studies on early childhood education? These are the trends or relationships that they found. First, policies related to the age of school readiness are varied and arbitrary. In some states the mandatory age of school entrance is five, for others it is eight. It is not based on research or developmental psychology. After much research in the fields of developmental psychology and neuropsychology, Dr Moore and his colleagues found that the ideal age of school entrance, or just starting academics in general, is between 8 and 11 years old, totally depending on the child and their individual development. There are so many factors that contribute to school readiness it’s hard to say exactly when a child should start, but most of the processes that are needed to learn how to read and do abstract math are ready around 8 years old.

10:58
Second, they found that a secure attachment and positive atmosphere is fundamental for making sure that kids are ready for school and that they succeed. Children need strong attachments to adults and I’ve talked about this in another episode on love and attachment and ideally this attachment is with parents, and to be with parents the majority of the day is also very important. It seems that the home appears still to be the best place for acquiring a healthy attachment, says Dr Moore. Most children cannot tolerate separation from their mothers before the age of five. Even the best daycare cannot completely neutralize the negative social, emotional and cognitive effects of mother-child discontinuity.

11:50
One study cited was an observation of children in London after World War II. Researchers looked at PTSD of children who were evacuated to the safer countryside and compared that to children who remained in London with their parents during the bombing. Their parents suffered from trauma and lifelong mental illnesses, especially if the children were between the ages of four and six years old, which is when most children go to daycare or preschool. However, the children who remained with their parents in war-torn London were better off. The psychoanalyst Anna Freud began studying children at the Hampstead War Nurseries in London who had been evacuated to the countryside, as well as children who had stayed behind in cities and towns with their parents and witnessed bombings. After 12 months, she concluded, london children were, on the whole, much less upset by bombing than by evacuation to the country as a protection against it. Parents’ love and their attachment with their children is a huge protectant against mental illness, stress, anxiety and especially when children’s brains are developing, they need that protection and they need to be near their parent, whom they are attached to. And in relation to that, he found that a positive, loving, warm home environment was one of the best predictors of success in school and being able to read without any problems later in life. So just making sure that you have a positive, warm, loving environment in the home is going to make reading much easier for your children later on.

13:44
The third thing they found was that neuropsychological factors in learning played a huge role. So intelligence isn’t the only factor in learning academic subjects. So intelligence isn’t the only factor in learning academic subjects. Children, all children, are intelligent and in other words, they have a great capacity to see connections, to make connections, see relationships and observe the world around them. However, academic subjects like reading and solving math problems require more than just intelligence. It requires that the senses and perceptions are fully developed. The brain and senses, especially hearing and vision are still creating connections and neural pathways until eight years old. So here are a couple of examples of what I mean.

14:34
So a child must be able to hear the different phonemes in words before they are able to read them on a page. So the word Jessica is made up of different phonemes that children need to hear Jessica, different syllables, or even the different sounds J, e, s, I, k, right. So they need to hear those all individually before they can read them and understand words on a page. My five-year-old was reading words incorrectly because he couldn’t hear the difference between a long A sound and a short E sound, so the A and e. He would get those mixed up all the time and that just meant that he needed more time reading aloud, having conversations and just letting his auditory sense develop a little more to mature. And this just comes with time and experience. But it is essential for reading success. When the eyes are reading lines of words from right to left the eye, the left eye is dominant until the middle of the line, middle of the page. Then it switches to the right eye, becoming dominant and reading to the end of the page and then it switches back again to the left when you go to the next line. This requires the eyes to work seamlessly together without any pause in switching.

16:04
I was once talking to a grounds manager at a local park who said he struggled with reading when he was in school, in elementary school especially, and he felt dumb for most of his life. He just couldn’t understand what he had just read. It didn’t make sense and he was put in special education. I’m guessing it was in the 50s and 60s. They really didn’t understand dyslexia as well as we do now. But he was put in special education and years later he learned that his eyes had major difficulties switching in the middle of the page, switching from left eye being dominant to right eye and then finishing. And so there was this block in the middle of the sentence in the middle of the page that he missed. He missed those words as his eyes were switching, and he didn’t get therapy until adulthood and his life was completely altered by something as simple as just maybe needing more time to develop or needing some interventions some pretty simple interventions when he was in elementary school. Some pretty simple interventions when he was in elementary school.

17:15
So how do the eyes become synchronized? Well, very simple. Running and spinning are two of the best ways to develop this perception the eyes. When you’re running, they have to try to stabilize. When you are spinning, they also have to synchronize with each other to see while you’re spinning, if that makes sense. So research is showing that sunshine also is important in having good vision. It enters the eye and seems to be the key to preventing myopia, which is nearsightedness, which is considered an epidemic in kids today. In some countries in Asia, as much as 40% of kids have myopia. We used to think that it was from looking at things too close, which is probably a big contributor, but they’re finding that sunshine, for some reason entering the eye, helps develop this sense of being able to see near and far.

18:17
So how long does it take for the senses to develop completely, or at least enough for children to do well in school? Great cerebral commissures connecting, in other words the connecting bands of nerve tissue, are not complete until after the age of seven. Lateral responses on the EEG, in terms of cognitive activity, do not stabilize before eight or nine years old. In other words, a child’s brain is going to be ready between 7 and 9 years old. Auditory and visual perceptions are essential for reading and they aren’t equal in perceptual capacity until age 9. Learning difficulties may arise from emphasis on new conceptual learning before a proper sensory perceptual base is established. The ability to transfer information across sense modalities vision, hearing, etc and to interpret this information is apparently not developed until eight years of age or later. And again, that is a summary by Dr Moore of the research that he looked into for sensory and perceptual development in children. So what he’s saying there is that the ability to transfer information across modalities so looking at something and looking at words on a page and transferring that to words that you hear that isn’t going to work really well until after eight years old. Interestingly, the same parts of the brain used for reading and math are also the same ones that are used for gross motor skills like running and climbing, rolling around, spinning. When kids have time to play in the sunshine to run, climb, spin, jump and look at things far away, they are developing the parts of the brain needed for future academic success, like reading and abstract math problems.

20:28
Recently I came across the term brain balancing from another homeschool mom. The idea is that two sides of the brain are responsible for different processes and they are connected by the corpus callosum. But when the corpus callosum isn’t strengthened and developed, the brain becomes lopsided and the two sides don’t communicate well with each other. It’s estimated that most learning disabilities are symptoms of a disconnected or imbalanced brain. There are so many things that contribute to a balanced brain and we’re still learning a lot about how the brain works and develops, but what we do know is that gross motor skills and being outside contributes a lot to the brain, both sides being balanced and communicating with each other.

21:21
Learning can also be affected by unintegrated primitive reflexes. There are many reflexes that infants are born with that eventually get integrated as they develop, but this requires a lot of time. Outside of baby swings and chairs what my child development professor called sensory deprivation devices what most parents don’t know is that the swings, the bouncers, all of these things meant to keep babies from getting into things actually deprive them of the experiences they need to integrate their primitive reflexes. The best thing you can do for your infant and toddler is to let them play unhindered, make sure it’s a safe environment as far as they’re not going to get killed or break limbs as far as they’re not going to get killed or break limbs, but letting them crawl, roll, climb. Just let them play and do what their body is telling them to do, instead of putting them in things that keep them from exploring their world. So here’s an example of primitive reflex. So there is a reflex on the feet that is integrated by running barefoot on many different surfaces and having those senses or the nerve endings on the feet rubbed and in environments where they’re not balanced, so like when you’re walking on rocks or gravel, there’s a lot of uneven terrain, and these are all really important for integrating that reflex, even terrain, and these are all really important for integrating that reflex. And another example is the ability to pay attention is influenced by the development of the inner ear, and the inner ear is stabilized by spinning and doing somersaults. So just allowing your kids to do all of these physical things that their body is craving to do is so important.

23:15
So that is a brief summary of what Dr Moore found in doing a meta-analysis of all of these studies on early childhood education and development. So, based on all that research, can we really be surprised that Charlotte Mason said to give our kids a quiet growing time until six, maybe even seven years old? Kids need at least six years of that time to integrate their reflexes, strengthen their perceptions and develop their brain. In 2015, stanford University did a study on waiting to start kindergarten and their results showed that there were academic as well as social and emotional benefits from waiting to start school until six years old. And can you imagine even just waiting until seven or eight years old for some kids who need just a little bit more time? So, again, the ideal age to start formal lessons is around seven or eight years old. For some kids you might want to wait longer.

24:18
I personally begin formal lessons between six and seven years old and I just see how they do. If they have a hard time with certain lessons, hard time reading, hard time with math, they’re getting frustrated easily. Then I take a step backward and focus on foundational skills again. So just counting physical things, playing outside a lot climbing, setting up obstacle courses, letting them crawl through things, tumble, run, race, do all those physical things that they need to do, running barefoot outside in good weather. After a while I give it six months and I try again and just see how it goes.

25:00
For my oldest he was clearly ready at six years old and he thrived. My second was not ready at six and not really ready at seven. So we just did gentle reading lessons and lots of reading aloud, playing outside, and eight years old, he is finally doing much better. But there are certain subjects in math that are a little bit more abstract that he has a hard time understanding. So we just pause and go back a step to where he does understand and keep doing those things. Same with reading, although he did take off with reading when he was five and did super well. But being able to sit down and do handwriting and math has been very hard for him and it has not become easy until he was eight years old.

25:47
With my third son, I started formal lessons this year because he’s six years old and I’m finding that he probably needs another six months before we do some more things like handwriting and reading. However, he loves math and he is doing so well. He will listen in on my third grader’s math lesson, which we’re doing multiples of three, and one of the questions was what is? You have three clementines and they cost 23 cents each. How much did it cost you in all? And within a few seconds my six-year-old said oh, that’s 69. When my third grader was still struggling to figure it out on paper. And so there are certain things that your kids are going to excel in and certain things that they’re going to need more work in, and I guess that’s what these years are for. These first six, seven years is for them to have occupations, but not, um, forced lessons. He loves doing math, and so we do that for fun, and when’s done, we’re done. Um, with reading, we just do a little bit, and when he feels like he’s done or frustrated, we end. And if it’s very frustrating day after day, then we will just take a break of a few months and come back and see if his brain is ready for the demands placed by formal lessons.

27:19
Hey, jessica, here I’m taking a short break to invite you to leave a rating, a review or share this episode with a friend. If you are enjoying this podcast and feel like it’s helping you become a better parent, this is the best way to support it and share it with others If you have left a rating or review. Thank you so much. I appreciate your support. Now back to the episode. By now, you know how much I love talking about the research and science behind what we do, but I also like talking about practical application. So let’s go back to the beginning.

28:08
Quote by Charlotte Mason. She said in this time of extraordinary pressure, educational and social, perhaps a mother’s first duty to her children is to secure for them a quiet growing time, a full six years of passive, receptive life, the waking part of it spent for the most part out in the fresh air, and this not for the gain in bodily health alone. Body and soul, heart and minds are nourished with food convenient for them when the children are, let alone let to live without friction, without stimulus, among happy influences which inclined them to be good. And then the other quote was by Elsie Kitching. She said we constantly receive letters from mothers who would like their children aged between four and five to join the parents union school. And we need to remember that children deprived of a quiet growing time suffer later when lessons should begin, showing signs of a lack of vitality or want of concentration. He should still enjoy the nursery freedom, he should still have occupations but not lessons. So I like to think of the things that children need at this stage in three things relationships, habits and living ideas. So first, relationships. Education is the science of relations, it’s what Charlotte Mason said.

29:33
In the early years children are not doing formal lessons, but they are engaged in a very important part of their education. They are forming relationships with the world, god and people around them, including themselves, first forming a relationship with their parents and family members. This is a foundational part of life. This is a foundational part of life. Healthy attachment to parents, especially a mother, has been proven essential for self-esteem, self-regulation, discipline, executive function and, more Really, truly, you must find joy and happiness in being with your children. Sometimes you just have to force yourself to do it or fake it till you make it. But parenting isn’t just warmth and love.

30:22
Charlotte said that in the home there should be an atmosphere of disciplined freedom, meaning that parents need to establish authority in the home, they need to set boundaries and teach appropriate behavior. Authority and discipline does not mean punishment, and Mason was very clear where she stood on punishment and rewards. Parents should practice masterly inactivity, which mean, which is the, which indicates the power to act, the desire to act and the insight and self-restraint which forbid action. Children learn healthy social emotional skills from their parents, not their peers. Peers can be great playmates, they’re a great place to practice good social skills, but they will never substitute loving adults who teach mature social skills. Research shows that children learn more pro-social behavior from mixed age peer groups than same age groups. It seems that the natural atmosphere of the child’s home really is better than the artificial environment of a preschool.

31:29
During this stage it’s important that children form a healthy relationship with themselves, their emotional, spiritual and physical selves. We can help them by labeling emotions, helping them identify why they may be feeling that way. It’s vital for them to have time to climb, jump, run and even wrestle, to learn about themselves physically, learn about their gross motor skills, what they’re capable of. They need to learn their own strength. Forming a relationship is very different from memorizing facts. At this age, children should be forming real relationships with the universe around them, not just memorizing facts. And I know there’s a lot of people who subscribe to a certain educational philosophy which says that children this age should just memorize facts. But I agree with Charlotte Mason in that they need to be forming relationships with the world around them.

32:35
They gain a relationship with physical laws by dropping different items on the ground or banging on the ground or on different surfaces. They form a relationship with the laws of conservation by pouring water into different size containers. They gain relationship with seasons, by playing outside every day and in different weather too. They form relationships with nature by smelling, touching and listening to various plants and creatures. They gain a relationship with mathematics by counting lots of different items, sorting them and exploring different shapes. In fact, according to Ron Aroni, a mathematician and teacher, prepositions which are right, left, above, below, and counting and getting a sense of numberedness and filling the weights and volumes of objects are the most important things for young children to learn before first grade.

33:33
One of the most important relationships children should form is with nature. The amount of relationships they can form is limitless Sounds, smell, textures and colors. It is open-ended, so it provides nature is open-ended so it provides more opportunities for creativity. It sparks questions and wonder that commercial toys just can’t ignite. And wonder that commercial toys just can’t ignite. And what is the best way for children to form relationships? Through play. Elsie Kitching said that there should be no so-called lessons in the playroom Occupations is the right word and for these no timetable. Which timetable is? A schedule should be set up and there should be a sense of much freedom, both in the manner and matter of what shall we do next? Again, just as the best love toys are the simplest in construction because they give full scope to a child’s imagination. Construction because they give full scope to a child’s imagination. So all material used should be of the simplest kind. Real, unstructured play should make up the majority of waking hours.

34:47
In this stage, playing outside is ideal because there’s a feast for the senses. There is so much to observe the clouds, weather, seasonal changes, plants, animals, etc. And I found that children can make a huge mess outside and it’s not stressful like it is indoors. So letting children have a sandbox, play in the mud with water and make a huge mess of leaves there’s just so many fun sensory experiences outside that involve messes. That is not as stressful because it’s outside and you don’t need to clean it up.

35:26
When kids play, they work through emotions, social rules and they build their attention and imagination. Think about it when a child is in deep play, it’s wiring the brain to pay attention for extended periods of time and eventually that translates to their lesson time when they’re doing math. When they play, they’re using their imagination to create stories and this is the foundation for future writing skills. When they play with blocks, they are absorbing the physical attributes of shape and how they fit together, which is a foundation for geometry and physics. They also learn how certain sizes and shapes balance and how to build towers that don’t fall down.

36:09
So that brings me to what should kids play with? What should parents provide for them? Well, elsie Kishine mentioned that they should be simple. The simpler the better, because the more simple it is, the more imagination creativity is required. She said they must have toys, but not too many. They must have games, for the most part invented by themselves, with their own toys or without. They must have things to do with the simplest materials easily found in any home. They must have plenty of good stories, songs, nursery rhymes, pictures of all kinds. So open-ended toys are ideal, and I made a YouTube video showing all of the toys that I feel are essential for open-ended toys, that are essential for deep and meaningful play and how to set up a play space that encourages imaginative play, and I will link that in the description.

37:06
So the next thing is that children need to learn good habits. Charlotte said that the mother who takes pains to endow her children with good habits secures for herself smooth and easy days, and if she’d be appalled by the thought of overmuch labor, let her limit the number of good habits she will lay herself out to form. The child who starts in life with, say, 20 good habits begins with a certain capital which he will lay out to endless profit as the years go on. So which habits does Charlotte recommend that children gain? Well, she has, like she mentioned there’s 20, but she mentioned 10. And I’m even just focusing on just a few of those because I feel like I’m constantly just working on the basic habits, and those are attention, obedience, cleanliness and kindness and, I guess, truthfulness.

38:01
Truthfulness is also another one. So those five are the ones, the big five that I work on with my kids and I try to start from a young, young age and focus on that in the early years. Instead of trying to get them to memorize facts and to learn how to read when they’re three or four years old, I focus on being able to pay attention for long amounts of time and to obey. Just simple obedience, like please clean that up, please take your dish to sink, please come here. Cleanliness If they spill something, go get a rag and clean it up. And truthfulness feel something, go get a rag and clean it up. And truthfulness not just telling flat out lies, but also not exaggerating, being absolutely truthful in everything you say and in Patreon this month I am going over the habit loop, exactly how habits are formed, and then I’m going over those big five, those five habits that are foundational in character and successful life and how to form them in your families. So if you’re interested, the Patreon link will be in the episode description.

39:10
And the last thing is living ideas, in other words, stories. There’s a book it’s called 30 Million Words, and it was based off of a landmark study that was done, I believe, in the 70s, and it just talks about the success that children have in life, in academics, in everything, when they hear words spoken to them and have conversations with people around them. The more words they hear, the better. Children need to experience the world with their five senses and hear lots of words to describe what they’re experiencing. Words on paper, the written word is just a symbol for spoken words, which are a symbol for real things or feelings or ideas. So your children will catch on to reading and love it so much more if they have a foundation in language and experiences, experiences, and then the language to describe those experiences and things.

40:13
You are constantly sowing ideas in your home through books, movies, tv shows and the stories that you tell. Many of these seeds will take root and grow in your child’s heart and mind. So take a serious look at the ideas you allow in your home. Does it contain eternal truth? Does it celebrate the good? Virtuous and beautiful? What does it inspire in your children? Virtuous and beautiful? What does it inspire in your children? Whenever you bring home a book or watch a movie, ask yourself if you’re okay with your children using the phrases from this book or this movie. Do I want them absorbing the beliefs and ideas of the people? Why or why not? If not, then don’t allow it in your home.

40:57
The formative years are when children form their foundational ideas and beliefs about themselves and the world around them. They will encounter less desirable books, movies and media later in life. I know this is true. I know we can’t shelter them, but it is our job to make sure that, in the formative years, that they are getting a sure foundation and the lens in which they view the world is based on what is good, true and beautiful. And this starts with the ideas that we feed in their growing minds. And how do we do this? By reading good books and telling them good stories.

41:37
Children’s minds grasp onto stories and remember them forever. They learn truth much better from stories than from lectures. This is because they have a strong moral imagination that senses truth and internalizes it. We don’t need to spell it out for them. They have a special gift for just seeing truth in the stories they hear. So tell them stories from your own life or from family members’ lives. My children especially love family history stories and that’s what they ask for at night. A lot of the times, the same ones over and over again. Some of my kids’ favorite books at this age are picture book, biographies, folk tales and nature books, especially the Thornton Burgess books about nature. This stage is marked by a voracious appetite for stories because their heart, their moral imagination are being established and this is a very good time to introduce them to all of these living ideas and eternal truth.

42:41
And if you want to learn more about the different stages of development during the early years, as well as how you can facilitate that development through simple activities and meaningful things to do with your kids, then I have made an early years guide that is available on my website. Things to do with your kids then I have made an early years guide that is available on my website. It’s over 150 pages outlining all the different stages and milestones and, again, some simple things you can do with your child. I also made a YouTube video showing what I do for kindergarten. I’m now on my third child putting them through kindergarten and I feel like I finally have it figured out, at least for the most part. It changes every time I have a child, but I feel like I refined the activities and the methods for getting the most out of kindergarten years and helping them prepare for formal lessons. So if you’re interested in seeing what I do for kindergarten without using a curriculum, then I will put the link in the description below.

43:47
You can find this episode’s show notes, as well as more information about this topic on our website, wwwsimplewonders.org. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing and or rating the podcast or, even better, share it with friends or family. If you’d like to further support our work here, you can donate by clicking the link in our profile. Thank you so much for being here. I can’t wait to discuss our next topic. Until then, go out and work some wonders.

Topics Discussed

Child Development, Early Years, Educational Theorists, Charlotte Mason, Dr. Raymond C. Moore, Infants, Sensory Input, Brain Development, Physical Play, Stanford University, Formal Lessons, Home Education, Stress-Free, Neurological Readiness, Quiet, Unstructured, Nature, Relationships, Play, Social-Emotional Skills, Executive Function

Brain Development Charlotte Mason Child Development Dr. Raymond C. Moore Early Years Educational Theorists Formal Lessons Home Education Infants Nature Neurological Readiness Physical Play Play Quiet Relationships Sensory Input Social-Emotional Skills Stanford University Stress-Free Unstructured