Lessons from Little House

Our family enjoys watching Little House on the Prairie, and in an episode we watched last Friday, the kids had a conversation which I found rang so true. Mary was trying to force her little sister Carrie (around age 3) to work on her alphabet, while Carrie wanted to draw pictures. It is important for children to learn things at their own pace, and this was a reminder to me also not to push W too much with writing when it's not what he wants to do, since he has a lot of time to work on that and boys of this age are somewhat notorious for not wanting to write. 

image courtesy of http://thefeedandseed.tripod.com

Here's the transcript of that particular scene from Little House (first season, For the Love of Johnny Johnson episode):


Mary: Here, Carrie. Let's make letters. (proceeds to start writing on the slate)
Carrie: Pictures.
Mary: No, Carrie, we're going to make letters.
Carrie: Pictures.
Mary: Letters.
Carrie: Pictures!
Mary: Letters!
Carrie: Pictures!
Laura: Let her draw! Why do you always have to spoil everything, anyway?
Mary: I don't know what you're talking about.
Laura: You do too. We always used to have fun walking home, and now all you do is show off playing "teacher."
Mary: That's silly.
(continues into an argument and Laura storms off)...


I know W will master the lower case alphabet someday, but he is 6 and many times would rather play outside or do other projects, so sometimes I need to let it go. :) I want to encourage him to write some letters or postcards more often to use that as practice time instead of forcing the workbooks every day.


We have our first Little House book club meeting of the fall on Friday, and we'll be attempting to make some corn cob dolls. We are starting the book By the Shores of Silver Lake by Laura Ingalls Wilder this week. 

potato printing!

We are now in the midst of /NT/ week (as in printing), and Will has gotten better with the letter N and he is already pretty good at T. Today the kids had fun potato printing and painting. W and I read a book about Gutenberg during nap time and he couldn't fathom a time when little children didn't have any books to be read to them. The easel has been an essential tool for us lately since it is great for chalk, whiteboard, and painting with the paper roll.

The other day he watched the Yoga Kids dvd which was recommended to us by a friend after his preK yoga library class, and he loved it. I was very impressed by it also, the turtle pose is quite difficult for Mama! :) We have the Babar Yoga for Elephants book but the dvd really shows other kids doing yoga so he was really drawn in so I am hoping he can practice this regularly.

frog week & fall

Last week was a busy one! The letter sounds of the week were fr, as in frog and friend. We learned about frogs and W did some fun frog crafts with S and his homeschooling friends at our first homeschool playgroup. He loves the book Little Quack's New Friend by Lauren Thompson, and it was so appropriate for the week since he did meet some new little friends and it also had a frog in the book. The final activity involving frogs was to check out some real frogs at Petco just to visit them, although some day I hope he will be interested in having small pets when he is old enough to take care of them.

This printout used numbers to match the arms and legs to the right spots.

W has decided he will be a tree for halloween, so we bought some faux fall leaves and I am working on making his brown sweater into a costume for him. He will wear brown pants and shoes to complete the look and I am also considering making a hat of some sort to go with the outfit. C is making it easier for me since we found a Winnie the Pooh costume for him already, and it will be nice and warm for him, W usually freezes at our town's trick or treat event.

The harvest season is winding down at our local CSA, I am looking forward to more squash and hopefully a pumpkin although I have heard this season has been rough. We have stopped doing pick your own since it is so late by the time we get there in the evening it is getting dark earlier now, so although W is sad he can't go it is a great way to learn about how things change in the fall.

Seeing stars

I forgot to post these pictures last week as we were away on vacation, but here they are now. W is still having a bit of diffuculty writing the letters S and R, so he traced those on our word of the week poster but he is great at writing T and A. :) We have been using printouts of Jan Brett's Alphabet tracers for W and he loves them. On her website there are a lot of other printables, it is a great resource.

We also tried making our own lacing star cards. I found that thinner cardboard works best with the hole punch, and got some posterboard for trying out different shapes. W wanted to use a pen so I let him write some letters on this one, but I am sure markers, crayon or paint would look cuter and there are so many themes you can do with this. As for other crafts, W painted a picture with glitter (a starry night scene) and we also did some more stamping as you can see on the word poster, the star stamp was a success.

Some books that we read about that featured the /st/ sound were: Baby Einstein's Baby Galileo Sees the Stars (C and S loved this one especially as it has sparkly stars to touch), How Stuff Works (a Search + find book), and the Berenstain Bears classic Ghost of the Forest.

Flower week recap & update

This week we focused on the "ow" sound as in flower, cow, and own. It was also our first full time week of having W & C's cousin S with us for daycare. S is 2 so I am trying to give W crafts and projects that he can do and S can participate to her ability level. The picture above was a fun project for all ages, making tissue paper flowers with pipe cleaners for stems, and egg cartons cut up to hold the papers in the shape of a flower. We also got the chance to pick a few real flowers at the garden, and made some flower stamp shapes out of foam. Straying from the flower crafts, he also made a handprint owl which came out really cute.

Here are a few books we read this week which W really enjoyed (I tried to tie in the "ow" theme with different words): A Color of His Own by Leo Lionni, Flower Garden by Eve Bunting, Flowers: 21st Century Jr. Library by Christine Petersen, Me and My Shadow by Arthur Dorros, Cowboy Small by Lois Lenski, The Cow Who Clucked by Denise Fleming (also great for the younger children), and of course the classic Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do you see? by Bill Martin Jr. & Eric Carle.

W enjoys the chalkboard for writing letters and drawing.

I never updated about the stamps, but more to come on that since this week it is ST week, and we are going to be stamping more. We are going with a star theme this week. W has been very curious about the moon, the sun, stars, and space lately so it should be fun and also very relevant to what he has been interested in. Next week will be a vacation week for our family but we will probably go with the "ch" sound of the week for beach, I am looking forward to that. :)

new uses for upwords

As we have been cleaning out our storage unit, I have been finding some awesome treasures of my childhood, including baby blankets, my favorite Cabbage Patch doll, and boardgames. For anyone familiar with UpWords, you know it is a bit too advanced for preschool ages, yet it is a perfect format for little hands to play with letters, make words and talk about letter sounds.

Today W chose a few words to make into our very own crossword puzzle. Forgive him for a few backwards letters. Puzzle coolness below. See if you can find apple, tree, shape --to keep within our Sh theme of the week, zoo, clue, go, and us (and a couple other unintentional words he made). :)

C is having a ridiculously long nap, due to his top 4 teeth no doubt, so W and I have been making stamps also today, we got the idea from the best kids craft blog out there No Time for Flashcards. More pictures to come later.

organization

We are in the very early stages of homeschooling, but one thing I figured out really fast: we needed a system. I liked the concept of Sue Patrick's Workbox system that I have seen on several homeschool blogs so we bought a set of 5 plastic shoeboxes to start out. I put number stickers on them and so far they are just in a pile, but eventually I would like to have it set up on a shelf. As I type this C (8 months) is getting into one of them, so I may need to do this sooner than later. We also need to put the baby gates back up this week, he is crawling so fast now!

Also I found a lesson plan book at Target a few weeks ago for $1, and it has a week by week calendar format which is very convenient to plan themes in, so it has been working out very well so far. Although I would love to be able to do things completely on the computer, it is more convenient for me to have the book to jot things down in and bring with me to the library, etc.

This week we are working on the "sh" letter combination, and the theme of the week is shells. Today after reading "What Lives in a Shell?" by Kathleen Weidner Zoehfeld and looking at a pile of real shells while discussing the animals that once lived in them, W made shell magnets out of foam stickers and glitter (glue + glitter always = a fun time). This morning we went to the library and also found a few other good theme books for our Sh week.

recap of "ee" week

Last week we focused on the vowel combination "ee" with W. I have been finding very useful information from letteroftheweek.com's letter sounds section, including recommendations for poems, books, crafts, and songs to go along with the theme. Last week's theme was trees. W painted green leaves which I then wrote "ee" words on including bee, sleep, sheep, and green and we reviewed each word as we put our tree page together. Throughout the week I also encouraged him to try tracing and writing the lowercase letter "e". He is starting to put small words together with letter magnets, and is getting good at sounding out small words.

W also painted a wooden puzzle (a paint your own sort of project) that he had gotten for Christmas from Auntie Chris. He chose two of his favorite colors, blue and green, and had a great time painting, it turned out very ocean-like. Then he wanted to make it an alphabet puzzle (which was a great idea because otherwise even I would have a hard time putting that puzzle together) so I wrote the letters for him and he finished it by writing his own name on the bottom pieces using the "gold dust" as he calls my gold colored craft pen.

Other things we focused on was making shapes and scenes out of foam shapes, and he discussed patterns with me and created his own color pattern and remembered the concept. And of course, singing "Head Shoulders Knees and Toes" throughout the week. Next week I am going to also implement a number of the week plan, since he is much more confident in letters than numbers.