Flowering Baby ~ Review

One challenge all moms face at some time is keeping toddlers and young children busy AND constructive.   Children are naturally curious and into everything, this is a wonderful time of exploring but honestly can wear a mother out.  If your a homeschooling parent some times coming up with ideas for your little ones is hard.  So I was really excited to have the opportunity to review Flowering Baby, LLC.

Flowering Baby is a “whole child development approach” developed by a mother and daughter team Martha Saunders and Carolyn Schulte.  When Martha decided to homeschool her son, she designed this program for him blending the methods of Classical, Charlotte Mason and Unit Studies.  These are the 3 homeschooling methods that I lean towards the most.

Flowering Baby comes in 5 volumes:

• Birth to One
• One to Two
• Two to Three
• Three to Four
• Four to Five

Clicking the links above will take you to an overview page on each volume.  Scroll to the bottom of the page for a PDF sample!

The first 3 volumes are broken down by age, even down to the month and day with suggested activities.  The lessons are kept short at about 20 minutes.  At the beginning of each month they give you an overview of the supplies you will need for the month.  This also includes books and music suggestions.  After this you just quickly check each day’s plan that explains what to do.  It’s really very simple and easy!  I found I had most of the suggested materials around the house already.

 The last two volumes are structured differently from the others.  These books have a monthly section and a theme section.  The monthly lessons have a focus on more academics, math, letters, writing,etc.  The theme section combines wonderful story books with activities for simple and easy unit studies.  It is intended that would would pick two themes a month to add to the monthly lessons.  The theme unites cover about 6 days each and the lesson take 30 to 40 minutes each.  These can easily be broken up into smaller time blocks though out the day.

I’ve been using this program with our youngest two children ds4 and dd5.  I had intended it mainly for ds4 so I planned to use the age Three to Four volume, however I’ve found that this also has worked very well for dd5 who’s birthday is late in the year.  I really liked that the theme units from the last two books cover similar topics.  This made it very easy to pull ideas from both volumes depending on the level I wanted to teach each lesson at.
I’ve tried to do this program first thing in the morning after family circle time.  I like this early morning time best to work with little ones.  I find after this they are happy to play quietly for a while giving me time to work with the older children.  But on the crazy days that just don’t seem to flow right, this program is so easy to use I’ve had no trouble fitting it in any time of the day.  I’ve also enlisted some of the older children to help with reading the stories or organizing the crafts.  This is lots of fun for them and extra reading practice to.
The first theme I picked out to do, was the dinosaurs.  This just happened to be a suggestion for January.  I knew that would be a hit with ds who is just crazy about them!

• We’ve read lots of dinosaur stories.
• Made play-doh dinosaur eggs and dinos!
• Painted dinosaur scenes and added leaves and sticks to this.  This was a big hit!
• Pretended to BE dinosaurs, well who am I kidding this happens daily with ds!
• Went on a “fossil” hunt.

Flowering Baby has become one of our favorite unit studies and I’ll be using this for the next few years with our younger two children.  Then saving it for my grand kids!!

Flowering Baby  comes in PDF’s on a CD that can be bought from their website.  The first 3 volumes are sold for $30 and the last 2 are $38.  Or they can be bought all together for $132.
Currently they are offering a 10% discount, use the code Blog10 when ordering.

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Kim Mills on Google+