Now, I’m not married and I don’t have children, so you can take what I say with a grain of salt :), but here’s what I’m thinking.

No educational subject has to be a big hairy monster. If you sit your preschooler down and say, “Okay, now we’re going to have a math lesson,” they’re not going to be too excited. But if they’ve grown up with math as a part of life, getting into formal education isn’t going to be so scary. For instance, when you point out a dog to your little one, don’t just say, “Look, there’s a dog.” Say, “Look, there’s a brown dog.” Or “Do you see the two red trucks?” Make colors, counting, music, etc. a part of life.

When my siblings and I were little, one day a week my mom basically scrapped school and did fun educational stuff. We colored/painted/sketched while listening to classical music. We sprayed shaving cream into baking pans and practiced writing letters and numbers in the shaving cream. (ahhh, such fond memories!) We finger painted, we made playdough, we played math bingo, we learned math by cooking and measuring, we played music games, we played Latin and Greek root games, we learned about classical composers, we read poetry………. Now, obviously we weren’t infants, but throughout all our growing up years, my mom incorporated music, math, spelling, public speaking, etc. into our school and lives. To this day, we’re all good at math (some more than others. *sigh*), we all enjoy quality music and we all have great communication and public speaking skills. None of us turned out to be very artistic, but I guess you can’t have everything. 🙂

Have good music playing in the house all the time, sing to your baby, point out animals, colors, numbers, letters and words, let your little one “play” the piano if you have one, read lots of books to your baby. Even if your little one is too young to understand what you’re saying, they will benefit from growing up with a lifestyle of learning.

So there’s my two cents. Hope it helps! 🙂