Alpha Christmas Countdown
Friday, December 9, 2011
Art in Letters
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
My son has difficulty writing lowercase letters. He loves to write, and every time he does, he uses uppercase letters and wouldn’t want to write the lowercase. Somehow, he isn’t confident writing it as he gets confused with all the curves and twirls lowercase letters make.
So my target as of this moment is to give him A LOT of penmanship exercises of lowercase letters aside from our usual Kumon Write and Wipe. I know that kids his age gets bored of using materials over and over again... so I try to vary my approach so to preserve his interest. I discovered this from Adventures of Bear... and as Julie would describe it “the child traces the outline over and over each time with a different color until the template is filled.”
Here’s my son doing letter a to g. We’re doing one letter at a time, but he keeps asking for more that’s why we reached letter g. I plan to give 2-3 letters each day if he asks for it.
The colors would have been apparent if we used his Crayola Pipsqueaks instead of Crayola crayons like what we did a few months ago (old blog). But anyway he enjoyed practicing and we’ll be doing this till we reach letter z.
Homeschool Wrap-Up (11.28 – 12.2)
Sunday, December 4, 2011
Sharing pictures of what we did last week (aside from reading books). We only worked a few activities as to most days, he prefers playing alone... pretending to be Mister Maker.
LANGUAGE
- We practiced reading of word families for ‘ot’ and ‘ow’
- Identifying beginning and end letters for our CVC words. This is still part of our Pink Series unit. I was hoping to wrap this up by the end of 2011 but by the way I I see it, he still has difficulty identifying ending letters. We will be doing this activity a lot so he can practice learning ending sounds.
SCIENCE
We sort his toys whether they are magnetic or not. Oh he loved this activity!
Then we did the 3-part card for Turtle I bought this from Montessori Print Shop. Supposedly, this is for our Pond Unit but since I didn’t have much resources to go along with the theme, I just whipped a few turtle-related activities.
Learned about the Life Cycle of a Turtle
MATH
Turtle sizing activity.
Turtle jumping game using number cards. Here I would tell him whether to jump by 2’s or 3’s or at times, I would just command him to jump to a certain number. Great way to learn numbers, counting and to have fun using motor skills.
I don’t know the name of this game but this is certainly a favorite during parties and get together in the Philippines. Here, I placed the same Turtle number cards on the floor, then have my son followed my instructions. Something like: place your right foot on 4, then have your left foot on top of number 8, place your right hand on 10 etc etc. When the game was over, this is how he end up on the floor.
It was fun fun fun! He kept asking me that we should play it again! (All turtle cards were downloaded from Confessions of a Homeschooler)
PRACTICAL LIFE
Lots of writing practice using our Kumon lowercase write and wipe
Advent project: The Creation
And sorting his toys by beginning letters. He did this all by himself.
Linking this to:
Frog Unit for Preschoolers
Monday, November 28, 2011
Since last week, we’ve working on our Frog theme. This is the second time we did a frog unit study.
My aim here is for my son to learn basic information about frogs, widen his vocabulary, understand that like us, frogs undergo a circle of life, that they use their body parts to survive and play around. But of course, aside from the serious stuff, my main purpose here is for my son to enjoy the activities I prepared for him and create wonderful memories together.
LIFE CYCLE OF FROG and FROG BODY PARTS
The life cycle cards were homemade and the body parts were downloaded from Montessori Print Shop for free!
I was so happy that my son, can pay attention to such subjects. He was eagerly listening to me while I read the life cycle of frogs and how they survive. He kept asking questions (which I love!) and for the most part, act out the pictures of the tadpoles or frogs from the book lol.
When his Dad got home, he demonstrated how the frog would close their eyes to swallow... and at the same time, how they catch dragonflies. He stuck his tongue out, lick his Dad’s jacket and told him he’s eating the Daddy dragonfly :)
Frog Math
Skip counting using my frog counter cards. I placed the cards in a straight line, and told him that I only have numbers 2,4,6,8 and 10 and we should be able to put this on the frogs by counting 2’s. Although he got the idea of skip counting, he’s still insisted that we just should start counting by 1 or 0 lol.
Then we arranged it so we can count them up to 20 (he was the one who requested this).
I also made this frog leaping game. It was an on the spot preparation. I told my boy that the frog is very very hungry and he has to eat the dragonfly at the end of the lily pad. To do this, we have to roll the dice to know how many jumps the frog has to make in order to reach the dragonfly. To make it more challenging I added a few stops in between so the frog can either skip pads or return to the starting line again.
PUZZLE/CRAFT
A friend of ours gave my son some nice coloring book and I discovered that there was a frog on it. I made him color it using do-a-dot markers, while using his red-eye frog toy as a guide. Then when it dried, I cut it into pieces so he can play with it like a puzzle and stick it together as a craft project.
But he requested that I should take a photo of him before he started working :)
And lastly, we worked on some matching game. I got this from Montessori Print Shop again for free. He is always excited whenever I tell him that we will be playing a matching game. It is his favorite activity... so I might get all those matching games from the Print Shop if I don’t have time to make my own :)
Wonderful memories were created once again.
Linked to :