Spelling Names and free printable Bookplates

M has been spelling his first name for a good 1 1/2 years now, but I am always on the lookout for some way to help him learn how to spell our last name and practice spelling it.  He is just not interested in learning it, mainly because it is quite long and a little intimidating. 

But he LOVES writing his name on the inside cover of books, so I made up some cute robot nameplates for him to use on as many books as he wants.  These are sized at 4 inches by 3 1/3 inches – a standard shipping label size.  Print them out on shipping labels, have your little one stick them in his books, then write his name on the lines.  The deal around here is you have to print both first and last names to be able to use these.

Click an image below to go to the download page.

Robots and Rockets Nameplates:

 

I also made up some more “girly” ones, in case anyone is interested!

Flower Fairy Nameplates:

 

Flowers and Hearts Nameplates:

 

Have a beautiful day!
Nicole :)

More Books, Please - poetry in the morning

After listening to some great talks from Andrew Pudewa (homeschool dad extraordinaire), and reading this wonderful article (especially the part about the importance of listening in order to learn correct sentence structure and grammar), I have really made an effort to give our home more of a reading atmosphere. 

Now, I’ve always been an avid reader, and M was born with the love for a good story… books are one thing we could not do without.  But, still it doesn’t hurt to add in a bit more where we can, or to be intentional about more reading than what happens here and there throughout the day.

I want to share, in a few posts, how we are adding more reading into our days.  I’ve created a sort of routine of reading for our day – stuck neatly where it fits within with our normal schedule.

Breakfast:  We read a daily reading from the Bible, or from one of our Saint Books: (these stories are awesome, but out of print, by the way). 

Then I read some poetry to M.  I think it’s important to develop a love of poetry – which can be a difficult thing to do.  It’s a different style of writing (many different styles, I suppose), has to be read a certain way in order to really “get” what is being said, and is full of a sort of dancing around the subject… do you know what I mean?  You have to be able to read between the lines in poetry… it’s always alluding to something, but never coming right out in good old plain prose and just saying it. :)

It’s good to do this at breakfast, when he is held captive not distracted by anything other than eating.  Some wonderful introductions to poetry are Shel Silverstein’s books, Where the Sidewalk Ends:

And A Light in the Attic:So many of the poems in these books are easy to understand and downright funny and appealing to a child. 

We also enjoy A.A. Milne’s books, When We Were Very Young:

and Now We Are Six:

Yes, he is the writer of Winnie the Pooh, and if you love Pooh, you will love the poetry in these books (they are not all about Pooh, by the way – in fact, most are simply about childhood itself – don’t let the illustrations fool you!). 

Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verse: is also well-loved, but many of the poems are a bit over M’s head right now.  I want him to LOVE poetry, not feel bored by it, so we won’t read from that one again for a while longer.

I try to find one or two very funny poems to read first, then something that needs a bit more digging to understand.  No more than 3 or 4 poems each morning keeps him wanting more and gives him something to chew on without being overwhelmed.  It also makes these books last a long time!

I was recently rewarded with M’s first “real” poetry (as opposed to nursery rhyme) reference … he saw a frost-covered window one morning, and said in a sing-song sort of voice, “It looks like Jack Frost was here last night.  I think somebody must have been dreaming about ________!” (I can’t for the life of me remember what he thought it looked like, darn it).  This was a reference to the beautiful poem, Jack Frost, by Gabriel Setoun, in which Jack creeps into your room while your sleeping and draws pictures of your dreams on the windows. :)  It’s one of my favorites, and it was such a special feeling to share that little moment with M.

I’ll write more about our other reading routines soon!

Do you have any favorite children’s poetry books you’d like to share?  I’d love to hear about them!

Have a beautiful day! :)

P.S.  Thank you all SO much for your kind and warm words in response to my little announcement yesterday.  :)  I’m so thankful to have “met” so many wonderful people in the blogging world!

Learning by Heart – Oct. 28, 2011

“The mother’s heart is the child’s schoolroom”
-Henry Ward Beecher

M – and a hula hoop. :)

Besides trying his best to figure out how to “work” a hula hoop (which was hilarious, by the way), M had a great week…

 

Independent Activities:

I bought a Kumon book of crafts a few months ago to keep M busy on a long car trip (it was perfect for that), and he recently re-discovered it when I was sorting through some craft supplies:

There are 80 pages of crafts in this book.  It has kept him busy and interested all week long.  It’s great for scissor practice and folding practice.  It calls for glue, but M has (thankfully) chosen to use double stick tape instead.  All kinds of neat little things can be made – a dancing dog and a rooster that flaps his wings are two of our favorites so far,  As well as this little fishing game:

Making the fish…

and then catching one.

The only downside, as you can imagine, is having somewhere near 80 little paper crafts lying around the house. :)  Still, I highly recommend it.

 

Pin punching autumn shapes:

M still really enjoys these.  There are two ways to do this – place push pins around the outline of the shapes, like this: Or use one pin to make holes all along the outside of a shape and then punch it out (like a perforated shape).  He loves doing both, and they are both great fine motor skill work.

 

Design and Drill set – well, this was supposed to be a photo of M drilling a design, but then he decided to make hand shadows where the sun was shining on the floor. :)  (I wrote more about this great toy a while back in this post, if you are interested.) 

 

Science:

We have a drawer full of “dead” batteries.  I am not sure why M insists on keeping batteries that are all used up, but we have learned to just not ask questions about these things or we will get an earful on batteries, which may just be his favorite conversation topic ever.  Anyway, they came in handy this week when M decided to build a battery tester with his Snap Circuits set: (the railroad track is just there for decoration, because we LOVE stepping over things like that in this house.  All. the. time.)  Turns out, many of the batteries still had plenty of energy in them to light a 2 watt lightbulb or make a small motor go, so now they’ve been relocated to the “non-dead” drawer and it’s only slightly annoying when we have to go through them again trying to find one that will actually work in something important. ;)

 

Math:

We played a “penny drop” game this week.  This was kind of taken from Peggy Kaye’s book, Games for Math:

I made a quick chart of numbers 1 through 9 and we took turns tossing or dropping a penny on the page.  Whichever number the penny landed on was the number of linking people we would pick and link together.Once they were all gone we looked at our rows and guessed who had more (simple graphing), then counted them to see if we were correct.  This was fun, but not much of a challenge for M.  However, I love these little linking people and just had to use them for something. ;)  

 

Literacy:

M has been practicing his writing.  He seems to have a preference for the letters M T H E and W. ;)   An occasional N and A get in there too.  He has been seeing how tiny he can write, and then of course I have to read it back to him, which really is about as much fun as you’d imagine. ;)

 

We played a little game matching up objects with their beginning sounds for a few random letters (based on whatever small wooden pieces I could find lying around, which were originally from Michael’s).  I had written the word on the back of the objects so we could self-check to see if we had chosen the correct letter.  M matched upper case to lower case also: I was glad to find that he didn’t have any difficulty with this, seeing as how we didn’t do much of this sort of thing over the summer.

We also played a feeling game with the large foam letters.  M would close his eyes (he decided against a blindfold, very emphatically) and picked a letter.  He would feel it for several seconds and make a guess.  I usually gave him a choice between two letters and he did really great!

But I don’t quite understand the bare shoulder thing going on here, or why he insists on wearing snowman pajamas already. :)

 

M also made up a little story this week and had me write it down on his whiteboard so he could copy it: I do not take dictation as quickly as he’d like, so I may have missed a few parts. :)  I think this is a great idea for helping him focus on spelling and phonics.  In the near future I plan to see if he would like to make up a story for me to type out for him,  and then have him try to sound out some of the easier words… we’ll see how it goes.  He is definitely more interested in this kind of thing if it builds on something he’s already created.  

 

Art/ Sensory/ Spelling/ Science:

This was the hit of the week.  You can read about it in this post from earlier in the week.

 

Creative Play:

M was awfully proud of the suspension “bridge”, which was actually more of an entire suspension track, that he made:The photo is not terribly clear, but he had an entire train track built up in the air around our living room, held up here and there by whatever was handy.  His trains actually went around the whole thing a few times, until of course the inevitable and spectacular crash happened. :)

 

M went to a Build and Grow class at Lowe’s (for children 5 and up) and got to build this little wooden monster truck with a real flashing light and glow-in-the-dark stickers. :)  He was very proud of himself and enjoyed hammering real nails into wood! The apron and safety goggles, as well as the supplies for building the truck were all free.  This is a great program, and Home Depot has a similar one.  I highly recommend it for any wood craft lovers out there!!

And we made some delicious pumpkin muffins:I wish I could pass them around to all of you, they were the perfect treat for this time of year!

I am linking this post up to Preschool Corner and Weekly Wrap-Up.  Check them out for some great homeschooling posts!

Have a toasty warm and beautiful day! :)

Art Time and a little spelling Practice

Deborah over at Teach Preschool has a wonderful Facebook page, where she shares great ideas that she runs across when she is online.  It is truly fabulous.  And that is where I found this little idea about puffy paint (and I’m kicking myself for not noting the blog where she saw it).

This project was definitely a hit!

We’ve done something similar to this, here, and that was also a hit with M, but today’s version gets microwaved and turns all soft and puffy (or hard if you put it in for too long – oops!)

Recipe: 1 Cup of flour, 3 tsp of baking powder, and 1 tsp of salt.  Mix these together, then add enough water to make it pourable, but not runny.  It’s a bit like pancake batter, so go for that consistency, although I think ours would have been better just a tiny bit thicker than we had it.

 

I used a funnel to pour it into 3 squeeze bottles, filling them up about 2/3 or 3/4 of the way; then added food coloring and shook them up until it was mixed in.  The shaking part may not have been the smartest decision since it made the baking powder want to explode out of the bottles, but oh well.  You might want to mix your colors in bowls, and then transfer them to the bottles. ;)

 

I had written our last name on some cardboard, in “bubble” letters and M filled them in with the paint.  He loved this.  I’ve been trying to get him interested in learning how to spell our last name, and was so happy that this worked!

This is how the paint looked wet, as M filled in the letters:

He loved doing our last name so much, he asked me to write his first and middle names out for him too, so I did and he painted his entire name. :)

We put the painted cardboard in the microwave for about 20 seconds at a time, testing it each time to see if it was done.  It puffs up and feels a bit like play dough, except firmer and not mold-able of course. 

Very cool results:

 

I was thinking of this as art, but M kept referring to it as our “science experiment”, and I guess he was right too!  So, we had art, spelling, and science – and fun – all in one.  It doesn’t get better than that! :)

Have a beautiful day! :)

learning by heart – sept. 30, 2011

 

“The mother’s heart is the child’s schoolroom.”

- Henry Ward Beecher

I am still struggling to find a way to fit our lessons into our busy weeks.  I am so thankful for these posts, where I’m able to focus on what we actually did, and see that it was enough, instead of only remembering what we did not get to.  I have heard that homeschooling pre-K and Kindergarten (I feel we have a foot in both of these places) can be done in just one hour per day.  And so 5 hours a week is my goal – you would think it wouldn’t be so hard to manage 5 hours, wouldn’t you?  You homeschooling mothers that do 5 hours every day… you are amazing!!

Here’s a bit of what we’ve been up to…

 

LITERACY SKILLS:

M has been writing up a storm.  We were recently given an old school desk that my husband had as a child, and we placed it in our breezeway for M:The top opens and there is storage space inside the desk.  I filled it up with lots of goodies: notebook, dry erase board, markers, pencils, his ABC collage and trace book, game book, etc. 

The first thing he did was grab a pen and his little notebook and set to work writing.  Here is his very first all-on-his-own journal entry:Need a translation?  :)  It says, “Matthew loves Mommy and Daddy  I’m 5 years old!”  Not bad, huh?  Some letters are missing and some things are written right to left instead of the other way around, but it is an awfully sweet first sentence if you ask the Mommy or the Daddy. :)  M did this mostly on his own, only asking me how to spell “years” and “old”.

We do a bit of copy work each week too (or more often, if he asks).  I let him decide what he would like to write, and he dictates it to me while I write it out on his whiteboard.  He then copies it into his little notebook.  Interestingly, this gives me a bit of insight into what 5 year old boys think about:“Car!  Go car!  Go scooter!”  Hee hee. :)   This is similar to what you would find in an early reader, isn’t it?  I find it interesting that he despises early readers and does not want anything to do with them because there is often no “real” story involved.  Yet, he LOVES writing similar things and is so proud of himself when he does. 

And, do you think the love of exclamation points is possibly genetic? (!!!)  I like to think we are just very enthusiastic about life around here. ;)  Actually M found out about exclamation points from a bottle of OFF! bug spray.  He recognized the word “off”, and was very excited to learn that an exclamation point gives emphasis to what you are saying, almost like shouting.  Let’s just say he likes to emphasize everything he says. It makes things much more exciting, you know.  :)

 

SCIENCE:

We did some fun science activities and experiments related to light and colors this week.  I’ll be writing about them on Sunday, and linking it up to Ticia’s Science Sunday post, so be sure to check back!

For now, I want to tell you about a great gift M received for his birthday in late August.  Have you heard of Snap Circuits? 

The set consists of metal connectors that snap together (so you don’t have to worry about your child playing with actual wires, although two “jumper cables” are included also), and you can build electrical circuits, using two AA batteries.  You can make the circuits do a variety of things.  There is a motor that makes a plastic fan spin, a music box, other sound boxes, lights, etc.  M has the junior set which came with a book of over 100 electricity-themed projects to do.  There are add-on sets too, which I’m sure he’ll be getting in the future.  He is really into batteries and figuring out how electricity works, so this is perfect for him!  You can learn more at the website I’ve linked to above. Sets of Snap Circuits have won a number of awards, and it is such a great tool for learning.  I’m not receiving anything for writing about this (although I think I may sound like a commercial), I just think it’s an outstanding product and I’m so happy we heard about it.  M works with his set every day, and it’s such a fun and easy way to fit a bit of science and engineering into our days.

 

MATH:

I am finding math work to be the easiest to prepare and actually do these days, but that means some worksheets, and well, you probably know how I feel about worksheets. I am planning on using a lot of the great games found in Peggy Kaye’s book, in future weeks, to supplement: (Thanks for the recommendation, Kim!)

This week however, we did a 1-100 dot-to-dot page, for numeral recognition and practice counting.  M loves dot-to-dots, and he’s working very hard to get to the point where he can work one of these all the way to 100 on his own:

I’ve started posting some blank pattern block puzzles on our fridge for M to work on throughout the week, whenever he wants.  I also place the blocks he’ll need next to it (which means I have to solve the puzzle beforehand, not always an easy thing to do!).  He has done great so far and really enjoys this:

  

We also played “store”, which is great for learning about money and making change, as well as grouping items into categories! Where are my sofa cushions, you ask?  You’ll find out below. ;)

 

CREATIVE PLAY:

M and Daddy had fun this week working on more engineering skills.  They built a huge (HUGE!) airplane out of Tinker Toys:

 

And M spent a little time aboard a ship he made in the living room:   Ah, that’s where those sofa cushions went!  We are currently reading The Voyages of Dr. Dolittle, by Hugh Lofting.  There is plenty of ship adventure involved.  Very exciting stuff. :)  I so enjoy seeing him act out books he loves.

 

FIELD TRIP:

We went on a little field trip to a local art center which has gardens and trails on its property.  We’d never been here before and it was a wonderful experience.  We had perfect weather and were surrounded by beauty.  There were trails splitting off in every direction and we wanted to stay and explore them all.  We’ll definitely be going back!

There was a pretty little creek with lots of bridges:

We walked along the creek, through a little tunnel, which was very cool:

And found ourselves here: 

Beautiful.  Perfect for sitting and reflecting:

We talked a bit about how lakes and ponds, and creeks, rivers, and streams are different… water that is always going somewhere vs. water that stays in its home. :)  I wonder which is happier? 

The art center was next, but we were not overly impressed with what it had to offer.  We liked these two pieces best:

A hanging sphere made up of fabric pieces cut to look like clothing…

and this pony, encrusted with beads, buttons, and all kinds of things.

I hope you all had an interesting and sparkly week as well. ;)

Linking this post up to Preschool Corner and Weekly Wrap-Up.  Check them out for some great homeschooling posts!

Have a beautiful day! :)