Home schooling a child takes time, patience, and planning to be successful. When you are home schooling one child and have a toddler who is not school aged, it also requires creativity and flexibility. You can plan and organize everything, but if you are not willing to be flexible in your plans, home schooling can be disastrous. I will offer my advice in this article about how to successfully home school one child and entertain a toddler at the same time.

The first thing you need to do is be organized. When you start off your week with a displayed schedule, you can make changes to it to allow for unexpected appointments or trips to the store. You should also keep in mind that you do not have to follow a traditional, public school day. You can do school work for a couple of hours, take a break and go to the store, then go back to doing school work. You can work at any time during the day or evening.

The big question is, how do you occupy a toddler when you are trying to teach a new concept to older child?It is common for a toddler to want to do what the older sibling is doing. Because of this, I suggest setting up an activity for your toddler at the table that is similar to what your other child is doing. You should also set the table up so that you are between your two children. This allows you to be able to easily work with both children. An example of an activity both children can do is writing. Although a toddler of two or three years of age is not going to be able to write the way an older child does, he/she will be happy with the appearance that he/she is doing the same thing. While your older child is doing his/her writing lesson, you can give your toddler a piece of paper or color sheet and some crayons to “practice writing” too.

Another great opportunity to do one on one instruction with your home schooled child is nap time. When you have your toddler down for a nap, you can introduce new academic concepts to your older child. You will also find that a lot more will be accomplished during this period of the day, because you will have less distractions.

The three keys tips to home schooling one child while also entertaining a toddler are easy on paper. You post a schedule for the week, set up activities for your toddler, and do one on one instruction during nap time. In practice, things can get complicated. You or one of your children can come down sick. You end up spending three hours at the doctor’s office. The key to handling unexpected situations that may arise is to be willing to adapt your schedule. You can take school work to the doctor’s office for you older child to work on. When necessary, school time can also be in the evening.

The final piece of advice I can give you to successfully home school one child while entertaining a toddler is to relax. The worse thing you can do for yourself and your family is to let home schooling become a stressful job for you. Your children will pick up on it easily and they will react to it, making the situation worse. Make home schooling a fun and educational opportunity for everyone, and you will be successful at it.