Week 1: Monday and Tuesday, (or How We Got Started)

The end of February seems a weird time to start "school", but since my daughter, Scout (that's a nick name, I don't want to share her real name), hasn't any sort of experience with it she will never know. And honestly if I had thought of it and tried to start it in January, I probably would've have fizzled out by now. As it is, I am in such a hurry for Spring to begin (which wont happen here until April, if we're lucky), that now is the perfect time to make some changes.

So MONDAY:

We didn't do anything. I didn't come across the idea and decide to really implement it until yesterday.

TUESDAY:

I started with an idea I saw on Pinterest called a "Name Puzzle". You write their name on bottle caps, one letter per a cap, and then they can spell it out like unscrambling a puzzle. Scout is way to young to spell, but she can identify letters. Not which letter is which, just that these symbols are letters and that they make sounds. Usually if she sees any letter she'll call it "A".

Well it just so happened that I found some milk bottle caps sitting on top of our fridge the day before, left over from when I collected our milk jugs to make a Halloween craft (...that I never actually got around to doing). The jugs have since been recycled but the caps were forgotten about all winter until I randomly decided to dust off the top of the fridge, (lol, no I was just standing on a chair to see the top shelve of another cabinet and saw them over there, I haven't dusted the top of the fridge in ages).

So I scooped them up and got out my scrap booking supplies and glued cute little circles with her name letters on them. Then I let her look them over; she seemed unimpressed. So another idea came to mind that I remembered seeing on Pinterest somewhere. I ran up stairs and dug out an old baby wipe container. The caps fit in perfectly. And she spent at least 5-10mins dropping them in through the slot and taking them out. She needed help getting the container open to get them back out.

I blacked out the letters of her name.

Vocabulary:

• the letters of her name
• in 
• out
• upside down
• right side up
• face down
• face up

Skills:

• putting a round object through a thin slot on its side
• opening and closing
• spelling...sorta
• letter recognition

So she liked dropping the caps in, and even flipping them over so all the letters were face up. It may have been a coincidence but she got all the letters (except one) right side up too, as if she knew how they were supposed to look. She did not get them in the right order but she consistently had the first letter of her name at one end and the last letter at the other end of her line.

This seemed like a good start. Later that night (because it was the only time I had to run an errand without taking her with me), I stopped by Dollar Tree and picked up some more supplies.

I'll go into some more details about that next post.

-Jes