Homeschool Break

We’re currently on break because I have loads of work to do and I also have to prepare new materials and plans for our future sessions.

Tot School Wrap Up Week 8

April 11 to April 17, 2011

Mavi 31 months old

Books were read this week.  

 

View Full Album

This week has been fruitful because we did a number of new activities to brought back Mavi’s interest in homeschool.  As you all know the past few weeks he was more interested in free play and doing things “his way” and doesn’t want to be instructed.  I also mentioned that since I brought him new toys, such as the wooden blocks and animal miniatures... all he would do is just play with them.

In effect Mavi seem to have lost his interest in art ... so I still try to incorporate art to our activities.  For this week I made him paint letter cardboards which I got from a craft store.  He ended up painting his hands.

Enjoyed playing pretend using do-a-dot markers.  I drew the background, telling him that it’s an ocean with a big big sun.  He was the one who added the boat, log and the shark.

 

He also started his 100 boards.  He love doing this.  He can only finish up to number 20 (2 rows). Funny thing is that my number chips would pop out because of inconsistence in sizes, too thin and not sturdy.  So the chips keep moving and popping out here and there once he placed them on the control board.  This irritated him as he wanted to perfectly align every chip.  So he was more busy correcting the line-up of the chips than placing the number chips to their respective controls. I hope that I can  get an actual 100 boards in the future.

Introduced skip counting using golden beads (tens).  We counted one strand of 10 beads and I told him that it is call “one tens”, then to make 20, I told him that we should add two tens.. and so on and so forth.  He participated but didn’t show much interest.

He still continued playing his farm animals.

 

Incorporating language lesson with animals and objects:  Moveable Letters and CVC Pink Series.  Will tell you more about my pink series soon.

I also showed him our object box for ramf.  Oh this was his favorite toy for days!! At first he participated with sorting objects according to their beginning letter sounds. At times I also use this to create stories.  But later on he just wanted to play with them in a free play manner.  I will try to prepare a separate post for this.

Play pretend includes cooking and doing groceries.

 

Practical skills includes foam stickers: peeling off the skin and sticking it anywhere and body part trace.  He loves to trace his hands, feet and body... then he would also trace my hands once his hands were covered with markers :-)

 

Working with Moveable Letters

Here’s our version of Moveable Letters.  I use foam paper instead of cardstock.

 

Once I completed one set, I used it to name the farm animals Mavi was playing.  He loves to spell the letters and “pretend” that he can read!

Tot School Wrap-Up Week 7

Mavi is 31 months old

April 4 to April 10, 21011.

View Full Album

Wonderful week, we accomplished a lot of stuff this week because he seemed to cooperate :-)

Painting, drawing and playdough.  He is free to use any materials he wants to use for our art activities.  I just made sure that his crayons, colored pencils, markers and pip squeaks are readily available to encourage him to write and draw and scribble.

 

We seldom do math these days, but this week I sneaked in a few “new” math activities.  We did number matching using clothespin, a math game similar to this, we also did cardboard insets and played his foam letter puzzles.

Then one day, I was in the mood for a little play so I set up a basin full of foam letters and added a few toy boats which I got from Toys R’Us.  He totally love our water play! He played with it the whole afternoon! The only thing he left me though was a messy kitchen and wet floor :(

We also did our farm animal play, putting buttons through a slot, peel and stick foam stickers and playdough.