My boys bring great joy and to see them enjoying a book together was so heartmelting. It won't be long until Isaac is actually reading to Eli! And speaking of reading...Isaac is still just so interested in learning, so I go with it. I back off when it seems too much or he doesn't care. He's still so young, but I certainly don't want to miss out on the opportunity to learn if he wants to!
We took our learning outside today. Isaac and I were doing some addition problems in Math U See. Eli was tired of coloring and really wanted Isaac's pages. So to distract him, I said, "Eli go find a really cool rock and show me." So instead, Isaac dropped his things and said, "I wanna find rocks!" LOL...so there went math out the window. Time to start science! haha...so we looked for rocks, counted, compared, contrasted, and used descriptive terms.
We even found a rock that looked like an Indian arrowhead.
These are called 5 Frames and Dot Patterns. I learned about these in my Coming to Know Number book from college. I think it is important for Isaac to visualize his numbers and recognize groups. I don't want him to solely rely on counting and counting on. It starts as simple as memorizing the way a 4 or a 6 looks like on dice. I also work on finger patterns with him to "see" his numbers and to "see" 5+2=7 for example by holding up 5 fingers and 2 fingers. The above patterns work like this: He knows each card on the 5 frames always has 5 frames. He gets just a split second look, and I ask him how many black dots he saw. Sometimes he actually sees all 3 but sometimes he figures out it is 4 because there is one empty frame and 1 less than 5 is 4, so he knows there must have been 4 dots. Just forces thinking rather than straight up counting. I think he is ready to move on to 10 frames already!
We've started a word wall of words/sight words he knows immediately. Many of these come from his reading and other word studies. We sort them into rows by rhyming words, color words, etc. We practice these periodically.
Next door to our word wall is our Chicka Chicka Boom Boom tree that I made for Isaac's benefit, but Eli's too as he is now very interested in the story and starting to show interest in his letters. (by the way this interest has developed WAY later than it did with Isaac! lol Eli is so different). After we study a letter, it goes up on the tree. Now let me explain my new way we are doing our reading and phonics.
I began to notice that Isaac was getting beginning and ending sounds mixed up. So I borrowed this activity from my Words Their Way book that I used in college. You sing:
"Beginning, middle, end,
Beginning, middle, end,
Where is the sound?
Where is the sound?
Where's the mmmm in mat?
Where's the mmmm in mat?
Where's the mmmm in mat?
Where is the sound?
Where is the sound?"
The child then flips the appropriate card based upon the sound you're looking for. I hope this helps him. Sometimes he wants to just shout off the last sound he hears when I ask for the beginning sound.
So I decided to go back to a study of beginning consonants. He totally learned these on his own through everyday talking and Starfall.com. By the time he was Eli's age, he was telling me what sounds the letters make. But I began really studying my Words Their Way book, and felt I should take a step back and do a thorough study. So here is what we do.
At the beginning of the week, I choose three letters that we will work on for that week. I try to study them in the order as suggested in the book. We'll look at vowel and unusual consonants separately at the end. I do three letters a week simply because this is review for him. I don't want to bore him to death by doing a letter a week. So he has this Letter Study folder. On the front are the many beginning consonant sounds we will study.After we've studied a letter, he colors the box to show we've completed it. We start Monday with time on Starfall.com to review those 3 beginning consonants. Then...
He completes a sound sort with those particular letters.
On Tuesday and Wednesday we do a draw & label and a cut & paste of the letters. On the cut and paste, I give him various pictures from the Words Their Way book and I give him magazine pages for more of a challenge. Make sure you check the magazine pages ahead of time for potential sounds!
For the draw & label, he draws something with that beginning sound. (I drew the mouse for him on this one.) He then has to label the picture to the best of his ability. We haven't formally done any handwriting yet, but I tell him to do his best at writing the letters of the sounds he hears in each word. He got bat! And rat! But didn't write rat in a linear-left to right fashion. The above picture was apple, popcorn, turtle, and monkey. :) I be sure to ask him to describe his pictures for me and later I pencil in the words on the back so that I can remember what he was drawing if there is any difficulty in figuring it out!
He does these letter hunts from confessionsofahomeschooler.com. These really are too easy, but he has fun doing them. I'm thinking about getting do-a-dot markers and asking him to only dot the p's or m's that are the beginning sounds for example.
Isaac also has a personal reader that we work on at the end of the week. Thursdays are Storytime at the Duncan Public Library, so that is usually his language arts for the day. I choose a book, sometimes related to the letters we are studying, sometimes not, but I choose an easy reading book with repetition so that he can begin to learn/memorize to read it to me. I cut up familiar sentences from the story on sentence strips and he puts them in order in his pocket chart. (The same place we sometimes do our morning message. Sometimes we read our story after calendar time and do this as our morning message instead.)
His personal reader consists of familiar sentences from the book he is reading for the week. Sometimes they are his own sentences he has dictated to me. He selects words he feels like he can read or recognize. Sometimes I have to test him out of context. These familiar words are written on small cards for sorting. If we go through the cards later to find he doesn't really know the word and we discard it. Sometimes we add the words to our word wall.
A list of these familiar words are also put at the front of the binder. I put a star by the ones I felt needed discarding or he doesn't really know. (Sometimes Isaac gets personal if he notices I remove something.) The personal reader really gives him confidence and helps me see what he is learning.
