My kids love their folders with all the cards they receive. From time to time they look at them, remember who sent/ gave them (which is important when half of your family lives in other countries), and it also gives an incentive to talk about other cultures, customs and countries. When a friend has sent a card from holidays, it often ends up with us taking the globe lamp out and checking the locations. It must help that I love maps myself.
I suppose this would be the method I would use to teach toddlers geography if I would be homeschooling toddlers? It is simple, cheap, educational and fun.
Now I still have heaps of stamps I collected as a child. Any good tips on what fun we could do with them?
Free But Fun 
[…] and “why can’t I join them on the stage?” it gave us an opportunity to take a new look at our globe lamp, and this time see where China is (since nobody has sent us a post card from there) and talk more […]
Wonderful idea! I’m with you – I love maps and geography. This is a great way to get the little ones interested too.
Glad you like it, hope you’ll create great memories too!
Saving all your postcards in a folder is such a great idea! I used to save all my cards too, but I ended up throwing them all out when I did a purge of my stuff. Must keep this in mind!
Happy you found something you like!
I always thought of home schooling as structured teaching of school-aged children at home, too, but then I came across someone’s home schooling blog who had a fifteen month old and she basically spent the day singing a lot of nursery rhymes and stuff and I thought hey! why not? there’s learning there! Check me out I’m a home-schooler! (I don’t know what official home-schoolers think of that…)
Anyway, it’s probably good to remember that we are all home-schooling our children in a manner of speaking, if only to remind us to think about what they’re learning off us!
(I don’t really think of myself as a home schooler.)
Yeah, I’ve heard about the home-schooling of toddlers too, but I suppose it is the way you say: creating opportunities to experience and learn in a way that is adjusted for the child’s age? So then it is really about having fun and exploring the world with your children? I like this kind of school 🙂
(which is important when half of your family lives in other countries)
We have photo books of the relatives (which for us is all) that live overseas
Expat Dad, photos are big in our house too! (and thank god for skype!)
No ideas on the stamps… I’ll keep thinking… but I’d say you already are homeschooling your toddlers there (if not full time). Your guys seem to get a lot of learning opportunities!
I do believe in learning and exploring life overall and actually not too aware of what homeschooling really is about – I just imagine it is creating a curricula and goals, planning and following up, more organised, like in school. I’m too hedonistic and spontaneous for that 🙂 (besides homeschooling “officially” only involves school children in Finland, and we go to school at the age of 7).
What a great idea, I wish I had of done this years ago!