Learning to Write!

Well, preschool really hasn't been the focus lately.  :-(  I kind of miss that aspect but school-age is getting most of my attention out of necessity.  I'm actually considering put T. in a GSRP program for different reasons.  He's not so keen on "going to school".  Said he wanted to stay home with the rest of the kids.  But...it would be really good for him to get with his own peer group for once.  So, I'll register him and then make a decision one way or another if he gets accepted.

However, T. - 4 years old- is learning to read and write!  He has NEVER enjoyed writing exploration.  However, now that we are writing actual letters...he's loving it! 

We do a bit of reading from the Teach Your Child How to Read book I've mentioned several times.  Then we move to writing and this is how we've been doing each letter.  I'm hoping to slip in some sight word activities starting this week as he's learned quite a few from his reading lesson already.

(Yes, we move left to right.  Since he's a leftie...this has taken a bit longer for him to get comfortable with but I think it's mastered now!)

We've been slightly following the Handwriting Without Tears order for letters.  However, the workbook pages I printed to go along with the letters include lowercase.  So, on a whim, I pulled out the sandpaper lowercase letters also and sure enough...he handled them just fine.  So we aren't following the true order of HWT's as we do the lowercase letters as well...but we are focusing on the uppercase letters mostly...teaching the CORRECT :-P letter formation!!!

Step 1:  Match the sand paper letters and trace them.  (We've been doing 2 letters at a time.)

Step 2:  Build the letter with HWT's "mat man" mat.

Step 3:  Stamp the letter with HWT's magnet board, trace, erase, write.

Step four:  sponge the letter on HWT's chalkboard, trace with chalk, erase with sponge.  (If he is having trouble with the letter or it is a lower case letter...I use the sponge first and he traces with chalk and erases.)

Step 4:  choose a crayon and do the work book.

Step 5:  Stamp the book as a job well done! 

Ha!  I picked up some "nice work!" "Super!" etc self inking stamps in Target's Dollar section and they are a hit!  I think I'll pick up some more like that for my school-agers as they are a bit jealous right about now.  :-D

 I've had this booklet printed for quite awhile...but never got to it with T.  Wish I could share the link though.  It was free.  I am pretty sure it was from Growing Kinders.  I thought it was a TPT product from her.  I thought I pinned it on my Toddler-Preschooler board but I can NOT find it anywhere!  So if you recognize this and can share the link, please do so.  

F is for...

F is for Fish!

A listening activity we did today...

After exploring with the instruments (these are very familiar with the children enrolled now, we do quite a bit of rhythm instrument play) each child gets a school of fish that has a picture of an instrument.  I ran out of time so we didn't use the blue felt we normally do to make a sea for the fish.  :-)  I gather the instruments that are shown in the pictures and we go through each one talking about them and their sound (a lot of opportunities for vocabulary building).  Then I choose one of instruments, and without showing them the instrument I play the instrument and they guess which instrument it is.  This sounds like a really easy activity but I find it's more of a challenge for the preschool children then one would think! 

 Upper-Lowercase Letters

Three times a year I do an assessment.  The first two weeks we matched shapes- upper to upper and lower to lower case letters. I was able to see which letters they remembered from last year, if they knew their sound and if they could give me a word that began with that sound.  I had planned to use the shapes again, doing the upper-lower case but they had lost interest so I decided to wait until today and pull out this activity I printed from www.childcareland.com.  Simply, they took the lower case letter square and placed it next to the capital letter on the fish.  I had never gotten around to using velcro with this activity, though that is what was the directions, I just used sticky tack.  However, I will say that using velcro adds a component of interest, especially when it comes to taking the letters off for the next child.  I've not met a student once that doesn't like to work with velcro!

Handwriting Without Tears

We'll be using this tool each week to reinforce the letters we have learned or are learning.  I also try to incorporate a little simple sign language because it's great for developing those small muscles in their hands. Can be quite a challenge as we can see in the second picture...but that's just fine.  It's where he is at.  Though they'll attend Kindergarten the same year...there are months between them as well as varied experiences and gender plays a role also.   One thing I will say though, with the 15 years I've been in this field, I would definitely be an advocate for our State's Kindergarten cut off date to be moved to Sept 1.  Or even a bit earlier in the summer.  Those few months make a BIG difference in a child's school readiness.  There are some exceptions, I agree, but in general, children that are well into year 5 have a much better success rate then those just turning or will turn during the fall.  A lot of it boils down to social emotional and fine motor readiness.  Again, my opinion.  Take it or leave it!  :-)

Fine Motor

I made this fish last year and they were very excited to see it out again.  And, for those who notice, T. has the bowl on the right side of the tray for a reason.  :-P  He's left handed and I really wanted to encourage crossing the midline.  The other children had their bowl on the left.  FYI:  a 1/4 teaspoon is perfect for transferring a marble. 

ABC Twiggles

As I mentioned last week with our L is for Llama, we are creating an alphabet book that uses the patterns from Kidssoup/ABC Twiggles.  Children cut the sticks/curves and glue onto the paper to create an object that starts with that particular letter.  I also encourage them to write the letter in our simple ____ is for ______. sentence and find all the letters in that sentence.  You'll see a lot with capital letters, I do use lower case letters also, but for letter formation I'm following the Handwriting Without Tears  program and their research shows that children can create the capital letters easier (and I agree or I wouldn't be following the program).  However, with reading, the majority of the letters are lowercase so that's where we do our lowercase work...with reading/letter recognition activities.

Hope your week went well!

L is for...

L is for Lizard!   

http://www.amazon.com/

A nice book that I've mention this past summer I think, is called Lizard's Song by George Shannon.  The summer kiddos as well as the ones today can be heard humming "Zoli, zoli, zoli...".  One daily activity we do is a journal in response to the book we read. 

Eventually the children will begin writing their own responses.  At this point in the year I start out with a fill in the blank sentence related to the book and they answer it, I write their answer, and they draw the picture.  Sometimes the answers are the same, like today, but other times they are quite different.  After we accumulate a few journal pages I'll bind them together and send them home.  Each journal page will have the book and author at the bottom so I'm hoping the parents will read this book with their child.  Children are so excited when we read a book they are familiar with at home and vice versa.  And repetitive readings of a book has so much value!

We also started into our focus letter.  Last week we worked with Mat Man and discussing sticks, curves, horizontal/vertical/diagonal lines and this week we used some of our Handwriting Without Tears tools to create the letter L. 

Sticks and Curves Set with Captial Letter Cards

(I really did not get very good pictures at all this morning so I'll use their thumbnails from www.hwtears.com.

We first used the capital L card to talk about whether we use sticks, curves, or both to make the letter.  Then they created the letter L with their own sticks in front of them.

Stamp and See Screen

Now picture it with the letter L.  :-P  We used the magnet sticks to create the L, then we used the magnet to trace over L.  This tool is going to get a lot of use I think. 

Roll a Dough Letters

Again, imagine a L and a lizard in the upper right hand corner.

I love that all of their items have the smiley face at the top left hand corner.  I used to use green smiley stickers and then moved to green dots long before I know about Handwriting Without Tears.  It's just a great way to create a visual of where to start when writing.

Slate Boards

Children used a small sponge chunk to write the letter L, then traced over with a chalk piece, then erased with the sponge again...all whiles saying L says /l/.  This repetition really pays off! 

We also did some Math Explorations with lizards.  My goal today was to see what they remembered from last year.  So I set some items out and said, "See what you can do here at this desk".  

Concepts that we introduced last year that I was looking for...

* creating a more/less set using the symbol correctly. 

* oral counting and counting with meaning.

* 1:1 correspondence with counting as well as placing one lizard on one branch

* if they remembered what a plus, minus, equal sign meant

* if they could sort by one characteristic and also verbalize their sorting technique.

* patterning-though this is a little more difficult to get with a set of so many different colors.  This works best when you provide just 2 colors.  We did a little patterning last week during journal time so I saw where they were at and so I wasn't watching as closely for this skill.

* measurement language

L is for  Longer.

This past Mailbox Preschool Publication had a simple "Longer/Shorter" book that fit very well into our morning this morning since we were talking a bit measuring with the lizards.  We used this as our scissors activity. 

No time to share everything so will let this be all until tomorrow. 

Have a lovely week!