I've tried to loosely structure our weekly activities around some things that I want my kids to grow to appreciate, including cooking (I supervise while they measure, scoop and mix), field trips (they get to help with packing and planning), nature (nature walks, outdoor scavenger hunts, etc.), and hospitality (cooking meals for other people, bringing homemade gifts to Sunday School/CBS teachers). Daddy did his part to show the kids just how important cooking is by eating as much of this pie as possible.
I made some flash cards and worksheets for Abby to start fine tuning her counting skills and number recognition. I totally underestimated how long counting cheerios out on a piece of cardstock could keep her occupied, but she absolutely loved this activity. My plan is to transition the use of these little counting cards into some basic math concepts later on (adding the cheerios on the number 2 card to the cheerios on the number 1 card to see if they fit on the number 3 card, for example). For now, we're just counting and playing with the cards. Abby gets pretty antagonistic if she catches on to the fact that you're trying to teach her something, so I'm hoping that if we play with these long enough, I can make her think the upcoming math games are her idea. Shhhh....don't tell.
Even Caleb loved my little worksheets. He enjoyed filling in all the circles, cramming all ten cheerios into his mouth, then showing me the blank page and requesting "More chee-wos, Mommy!"
And, as is our standard practice when the weather is pleasant, we headed into the backyard. Having only one of these little ride-in cars provided the perfect environment for a productive lesson on sharing, turn-taking and kindness. Abby sang her memory verse song "Be Kind to Each Other" for me, but has changed the words to "Be kind to your brother..." because apparently that's what comes out of my mouth all the time.
We added some more sight words to our repertoire this week. It was letter i week, so we worked on reading the words is, it, in, and I. Abby was getting really good at recognizing and sounding out the word is in particular by the end of the week. She has long recognized her name, so I spent some time on Friday (while we were waiting on our appetizer at our favorite pizza place) reviewing her t words from last week, and then put together a simple sentence for her to see what would happen. To my delight, my little girl read her first sentence this week: Abby is three. She's "read along" with books in the past that she has memorized (not so much reading as repetition), but this marked the first time I've shown her a random combination of words and asked her to read it. I'll admit, there have been times over the last five weeks that I've had my doubts about my reading goals for her this year, but this big milestone was just the encouragement I needed.
I made some flash cards and worksheets for Abby to start fine tuning her counting skills and number recognition. I totally underestimated how long counting cheerios out on a piece of cardstock could keep her occupied, but she absolutely loved this activity. My plan is to transition the use of these little counting cards into some basic math concepts later on (adding the cheerios on the number 2 card to the cheerios on the number 1 card to see if they fit on the number 3 card, for example). For now, we're just counting and playing with the cards. Abby gets pretty antagonistic if she catches on to the fact that you're trying to teach her something, so I'm hoping that if we play with these long enough, I can make her think the upcoming math games are her idea. Shhhh....don't tell.
Even Caleb loved my little worksheets. He enjoyed filling in all the circles, cramming all ten cheerios into his mouth, then showing me the blank page and requesting "More chee-wos, Mommy!"
And, as is our standard practice when the weather is pleasant, we headed into the backyard. Having only one of these little ride-in cars provided the perfect environment for a productive lesson on sharing, turn-taking and kindness. Abby sang her memory verse song "Be Kind to Each Other" for me, but has changed the words to "Be kind to your brother..." because apparently that's what comes out of my mouth all the time.
We added some more sight words to our repertoire this week. It was letter i week, so we worked on reading the words is, it, in, and I. Abby was getting really good at recognizing and sounding out the word is in particular by the end of the week. She has long recognized her name, so I spent some time on Friday (while we were waiting on our appetizer at our favorite pizza place) reviewing her t words from last week, and then put together a simple sentence for her to see what would happen. To my delight, my little girl read her first sentence this week: Abby is three. She's "read along" with books in the past that she has memorized (not so much reading as repetition), but this marked the first time I've shown her a random combination of words and asked her to read it. I'll admit, there have been times over the last five weeks that I've had my doubts about my reading goals for her this year, but this big milestone was just the encouragement I needed.Don't laugh. I know I'm not the only mom out there that thinks her three-year-old is a genius. It's just that I have the YouTube video to prove it.
No comments:
Post a Comment