I wrote here a few weeks ago about why I ordered a mobile whiteboard for our homeschool, and the short version is that it arrived, I set it up in the corner of the learning room, and then I stood there wondering what exactly we were going to do with it. I had the board. I had the markers. I had a twenty-one-month-old daughter who wanted to hold a marker and draw on everything within reach.
What followed was three weeks of finding out. Some of what ended up on the board I had planned. Most of it just happened. I'm writing it down because the question I keep getting in the homeschool groups I've been lurking in is: "but what do you actually do with a whiteboard that age?" This is the honest answer.
The first thing I put on it was a visual schedule. Just the rough shape of our morning: wake, dress, eat, outside time, learning time, lunch. Simple icons next to each word because she's too young to read reliably yet. She stared at it for a long time. Then she pointed at the outside icon and looked at me with the expression of someone making a reasonable request. That was not what I expected. I expected her to ignore it. What happened instead was that the board gave her a way to ask about time. She could point at the thing she wanted to know about. The board became a shared language before I'd planned a single lesson.
Next came a weekly weather forecast. Seven days across the top, icons below: sun, cloud, rain, wind. I draw it on Sunday evening and she helps me fill in Monday morning's weather after going to the window to check. We've kept this up for several weeks. She can name all the weather symbols. She knows which one means sandals are a possibility. I'm not sure what subject this falls under but it is definitely a subject.
The roads and maps session was unplanned. She has a set of small magnetic cars and one afternoon she brought them over to the board and looked at me. I drew a road. She drove a car on it. I drew an intersection. She stopped, looked both ways, and drove through. I added labeled buildings at the corners. She spent the rest of the afternoon navigating between the bakery and the library. Last week she asked me to add a train station. I'm running out of room on the lower half of the board.
Magnetic letters and numbers came after I saw how long the map session held her attention. I ordered a foam magnetic letter set and we do a simple pairing game: I draw a large letter on the board and she finds the matching magnet and presses it on top. Or I stick a number magnet to the board and draw that many of something beside it. No scoring, no timer, no pressure. She either wants to play or she doesn't and I let her tell me which.
Piano notes were my wife's idea. Our daughter has been banging on a small toy keyboard and my wife, who plays piano, wanted to connect the physical keys to something visual. We drew a simplified keyboard across the lower portion of the board, labeled the white keys, and added a short staff above with notes placed on it. We play a key, point to the note, say the name. She can now reliably identify middle C and the keys on either side. My wife said later that drawing it out helped her understand how she herself had learned piano as a child, which she found unexpectedly clarifying.
The number line I drew on a Tuesday morning when we needed a way to talk about quantities without just counting fingers. A horizontal line from zero to twenty, marks and numbers at each point, and a set of small magnets she can place along it. The thing that made it land was when I drew a small figure of her at the six and a small figure of me at the zero and asked: how far do I need to walk to reach you? She counted the spaces. The abstract line became a story about distance, and counting became something you do for a reason.
Magnetic tangrams came from a suggestion at a homeschool meetup. The idea is simple: draw tangram outlines on the board and fit pieces into them. We've made it looser because I don't have actual tangram pieces. I draw shape outlines of varying complexity and she tries to fill them with a set of foam geometric magnets. The harder shapes frustrate her. I'm learning to let the frustration sit for a moment before I help, which is its own kind of lesson for me.
The menu was her idea, or as close to an idea as a twenty-one-month-old communicates. She kept resisting the verbal question of what she wanted for breakfast, but she'd walk to the kitchen board and point at things on it. So I made her a proper menu: four options drawn with rough pictures next to each word. She points at what she wants. I write her choice in a box at the bottom, then we make it. The drawn menu gives her choices a physical form she can commit to. She takes the decision very seriously.
The solar system happened on a Saturday after she asked for the fourth time that week where the moon goes during the day. I drew the sun at the center, eight orbital paths around it, a planet on each one. We spent the afternoon on it. I wrote short facts next to each planet in small text. When I wrote that Jupiter has seventy-five moons she asked to draw them. We got to twenty-three before we ran out of room. She wanted to erase the rest of the board to make space for the remaining fifty-two. We did not do that, but we did count the ones we'd drawn several times.
The pretend building started with a request to draw a house. I drew a cross-section view, like a dollhouse with visible rooms. She wanted an elevator. I added one, with arrows showing up and down. She wanted a grocery store next door. I drew it, then a parking lot connecting the two, then a road out front. She populates everything with small round magnets she's designated as people. The game has been running for two weeks and is by far the most complex ongoing activity we have. She tells me what to add. Yesterday she asked for a hospital.
Mazes I draw while she eats breakfast. Simple ones at first, now more involved. She traces the path with her finger before trying it with a marker. The tracing is slower and more deliberate than the attempt, and I think that deliberateness is the point. She's already learned to scout before committing, which I did not teach her directly.
Letter tracing grew out of the mazes. She wanted to trace the letters I was writing, not just the paths. I started drawing large outlined letterforms she could fill in with a marker of her own. Then she wanted to trace pictures too: an animal, a car, a tree. Some of what we do at the board now has no learning objective I can name. It is just drawing for its own sake. I've stopped trying to frame it as a lesson. Art is enough.
The story with fill-in-the-blanks is what we do when I want something slower and collaborative. I write a sentence with a blank and she fills in a word. "The _____ jumped over the fence." She says "elephant." I write it. I read the sentence back. She decides the elephant needs a name and we add a second sentence. By the end we have four or five sentences that form a story that makes no conventional sense and that she asks me to read aloud several times running. The reading-back is the part she likes most. I think she likes hearing evidence that what she contributed became real.
Drawing portraits is the most recent thing and the one I look forward to most. I drew her one afternoon when she was still long enough, and she wanted to draw me. Her portrait of me has a large circular head, two limbs that may be arms or legs depending on interpretation, and a feature in the upper left of the face that I believe is a hat but she maintains is a nose. I've photographed it. We've done this six times now. There is a competition, declared by her, with rules she has not fully explained. She has won every round.
The board has been up for three weeks and I've refilled the marker tray twice. The room that used to feel like a space waiting for its purpose has found one. What I didn't anticipate is how much of what goes on the board comes from her rather than from me. She walks over and points at it and I pick up the marker and we figure out what we're doing together. That seemed like the right sequence before I had experience with it. It turns out to be.