Art in Letters

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)

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.

 

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Homeschool Wrap-Up (11.21 – 11.25)

It’s been days of terrible weather.  My boy and I are hungry for some outdoor fun.  But I doubt it, with winter coming, it would be impossible to play ball at the backyard or go on a scavenger hunt :)  Thus, I really have to plan out homeschool activities for he’ll be staying indoors most of the time, till next year I guess.  Except, if the snow arrives and we have enough of it to play around.  It would be fun to make snowman and ice castles!

Here’s what we did last week... and earlier this week.

MATH

Mavi started to learn counting by 10s and 2s.  First we did counting by 10s.  It went good.  I made him fill each cup with ten beads and after he completed the cups, I told him that we needed to count by tens as there’s just too much to count.  I placed the number 10 card on the first cup, and when we get to the 2nd cup, I told him, "now there’s 2 tens.  2 tens make 20” and with that I instructed him to place the number 20 card on the 2nd cup.  Same goes through to the 3rd cup, I asked him how many tens do we have now.. and he said “3” and I said “3 tens is 30”.  We did it with the rest until we reached 80. 

It’s easy to demonstrate it if you group counters together rather than made them memorize the number symbol... which was the way I was taught LOL.  Same with skip counting by 2’s.  The challenge here though is that at the beginning he insisted that we counted from 1..2..3. He kept asking for the missing numbers LOL. 

Patterning is my son’s least favorite activity.  He’s showing no interest at it at all. Whenever we do this, he would timidly complete the activity so unlike with the rest.  Hopefully he’ll appreciate it in the future.  Patterns were downloaded from here.

Beginning letter sounds using clip cards and we used the Pond Printable Pack from Homeschool Creations. He loves this kind of activity... anything that has to do with letters :)

 

PRACTICAL LIFE

First time I introduced weaving activity and something that he enjoyed.  I first showed him how to do it, emphasizing on the over and under motion of my hands.

When he worked on it, I still had to instruct him weather the strips go either over or under.  But somehow he managed to finish it.  I plan to re-introduce this again next month :)

Helping Mommy in putting up our Christmas Tree.  Actually, it was more like playing around with the Christmas balls and the glittered stars and snowflakes :)

 

This orange scissor is currently his obsession.  So using scraps, I made some shapes and told him to cut it out.  He manages to cut the triangle, rectangle and square properly... but still couldn’t cut shapes with curves.

While playing with watercolors, I managed to teach him all about lines... straight lines, diagonal and curves.  But somehow he’s not just into it.

SCIENCE

Read about our frog activities here.

Frog Unit for Preschoolers

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.

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