Morning Message

The last few days were pretty busy. My parents were here, I had to get Eli’s pictures taken, Eli’s birthday, and some other personal business to work out. We still managed to get a little homeschooling in!

Everyday we have continued with our morning message. Isaac has even asked to do it some mornings! I bought a pocket chart to put our messages in weekly.

At the end of each week, I put each cut up sentence strip in a separate envelope, date it, and write the sentence on the outside of the envelope. Isaac can then go back in his own time and play with the sentence, try to put them in correct order and such.

This morning Isaac played around with the sentence from last week: "We took Nicholas and Leah to school." He laughed, mixing the words around and making nonsensical sentences, but this taught me something! Last week, he was reading the sentences in the pocket chart. I figured he was just memorizing the sentences that we came up with. But this taught me that he didn't just simply memorize the entire sentence as a whole, but that he could sight read each word! He was memorizing or learning the words as a whole. When reading his nonsensical sentences to me, he pointed to each word individually and read them aloud. Wow. This approach really does work! 

I couldn't get him to put the sentence back in the right order. I wasn't sure if he was just being stubborn and didn't want to do it or wasn't sure how to do it. So that is when I wrote the sentence correctly on the outside and told him he could look at it and copy. He moved on to playing with his toys at that point. Attention span gone!

I bought an ABC strip and put it around his room. I've caught him standing under it and looking at the letters. He'll point and sing the ABC song. Sometimes he just says the letters. When we've randomly talked about letters in the day, I know he's looked at it because he'll say "J as in jelly beans," a picture on the ABC strip.

I loved read alongs when I was little. I remembered one particular read along that I loved. I called mom to see if she could find it. She found the tape, but no books. So when she went to visit Mamaw the other day, sure enough, she found the books! I shared them with Isaac. He wasn't as thrilled as me....yet.

We've really focused alot on sorting, letters, and phonics. I wanted to work with patterns. Isaac likes to get out my unifix cubes and play, so I used this as a time to try some simple ABAB patterns. He had a good time with it.

I'm learning so much if not more than Isaac with this! Some days we don't do much of anything, other days more. It is alot of fun! I can't wait to start library day next week. I hope he'll stay for the hour and enjoy it!