Week 4: Friday

***Linking up with Tot School Gathering Place at 1+1+1=1 today!***

FRIDAY:

On Thursday we took a break. So on Friday I pulled out some construction paper and glow in the dark stars.

I traced the stars to form the letter G, then outlined the G around the stars. I also wrote "Green" under it.

My G is a little top heavy, I really do need to find, set up, and restock our printing supplies. Although this has given me an opportunity to practice my own drawing/tracing/penmanship skills ;)

As she was putting the stickers in place, I would say "G. Ga, ga, ga, Green." or "What shape is that?...A star."

I was really surprised that Scout knew what to do right away. I didn't even have to show her to match the shape of the sticker to the shape on the paper. She was really excited about it too. I did have to peal the backing off the stickers though.

She didn't match them up perfectly, but I was still really proud. Honestly, I expected her to just stick them on the page anywhere and pay no attention to the outlines. We will definitely do more play like this in the future.

Vocabulary:

• G
• Green
• Star
• Sticker

Skills:

• Matching shapes
• Letter/color recognition work
• Fine motor skills placing the stickers

The stickers were glow-in-the-dark so that was another fun aspect. After she stuck them all on, we tried to find the darkest corner in the house to look at them.


Last weekend Scout played with some leprechaun window clings. It kept her entertained for quite a while. She would peal them off the window and rearrange them. She like lining them up in different ways too. She came back to them occasionally throughout the week, and I even caught her giving the little guys kisses.

 

This  week we never did get around to painting, or going on a leprechaun hunt, or making green play-dough. But I think she was exposed to a lot more green than she has been, and I'm glad we worked on it. She has trouble distinguishing it from pink, but I think that is because the two words sound similar.

-Jes

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