From Day One: Preparing Your Baby for Grammie's Way (Ages 0-2)

From the very moment they are born, our babies are learning.

We watch them grow day by day, we settle them into a routine, and suddenly, we find ourselves wondering: How does a tiny baby know to push their arm right into the armhole of their shirt so early in life? It is easy to think they just do it naturally. But what we don't always realize is that we have been teaching them how it is done from birth. It doesn't come naturally—it comes from months and months of us guiding their little arms through that hole and showing them how!

If they can learn that just from our daily routine, what else could they learn if we intentionally built knowledge into our everyday lives?

The Magic of Simple Repetition

Think about this: What if you told your baby what color clothes they had on every single day?

What if you showed them the alphabet and went over their numbers every single week? Let's look at the math on that. There are 52 weeks in a year. Over the course of their first two years, you will have repeated the alphabet and numbers 0 through 9 to your child over 100 times!

Just imagine what else they would know if you went over it over 100 times in two years, long before they ever step foot in a Pre-K or kindergarten classroom. What if they could sing the alphabet before they could even form a complete sentence? We know how quickly a child can memorize a song. A musically inclined child might pick it up faster, but all children can learn these foundational building blocks through simple, daily, uncomplicated ways.

The World is Your Classroom (Even the Nursery!)

Preparing for Grammie's Way of Teaching Academy (GWOTA) doesn't mean sitting a six-month-old at a desk. It means turning their environment into a living learning space. You can teach them while they are eating breakfast, while they are bouncing in their jumper, or while they are just laying in their crib.

Here is how we bring the classroom to them in those first two years:

• Narrate the Wardrobe: Every time you get them dressed, talk about it. "Today we are putting on your blue shirt and your yellow socks."

  
  

• Look Up: Who says learning belongs on a chalkboard? Put letters and numbers on the ceiling above their crib or changing table where they can see them!

  
  

• The Daily Room Tour: Put letters on the walls around the room. Once a day, hold your baby, walk around the room, point to a letter, and say what it is.

  
  

• Keep It Fresh: Babies are incredibly observant. The next week, take those letters off the wall, rearrange them in a different order, and do the room tour again.

  
  

Learning doesn't have to be a chore, and it doesn't have to be complicated. It just has to be a part of your daily life. When we weave these simple lessons into our everyday routines, we are building a foundation that will support them for the rest of their lives.

Blessings to you,

Grammie Em