Learning by Heart – May 13, 2011

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

  Mother’s Day 2011
This was taken at the end of the day – I look worn out and
M looks ready to go. :)  That is usually how it is around here! 
I normally wouldn’t post a picture of myself with glasses on (I so dislike how I look in them), but I have to be in SOME pictures on here!  It’s my blog! :)

~M is 4.5 years old~

Literacy

M continues to love poems and these sequencing cards are a great activity.  He can do these all on his own, as long as I separate them into groups for him (one paperclip of cards for each poem): 

His homemade puppet theater (a tension rod in a doorway with a blanket thrown over the top) has been seeing more action lately, and we made these great little stick puppets for The Three Bears.  This is a fun way of doing more story sequencing and mom and dad get a cute little show to watch. ;) 

And M wants to learn to read.  You can read more about that in this post.

 

Science – Dinosaurs!

M loves the little dinosaur fossil eggs you chisel apart in order to find the bones.  He’s done many, many of these over the winter and early spring.  You can find them at Michael’s as well as Dollar Tree. See the little hammer lying on the table?  That quickly got set aside, and M began using his “real”, big hammer.  This kid is all about action, not patience.

     This particular one is an Ankylosaurus.  For each dino he’s unearthed and put together, we’ve looked for a book to learn a bit more about it.  I can’t remember the names of the books, but there are a ton of dino books out there (on the odd chance you haven’t noticed)!

 

Fine Motor Skills, Practical Life, and Misc.

After seeing this post over at My Montessori Journey, I thought it would be fun to set something similar out for M.  I found simple step-by-step tutorials for drawing a bird and a dog (look towards the bottom of the web page for the dog), and made instruction cards for M.  He wasn’t as eager to do this as I imagined he would be, and that was fine.  I don’t want to inhibit his own imaginative drawings by making him think things have to be drawn in a certain way.  However, I did enjoy seeing how he was able to go from step to step in order.  Here are the cards (I had each set on a ring):
And here are M’s finished drawings: Are these not absolutely adorable?!  :)  He said, “look at my chicken!” – I think he surprised himself, haha.  I have to say I like his chicken better than the bird he was trying to draw. :)

 

M loves to watch me use my sewing machine.  It is an event, let me tell you.  He anticipates it, watches every move, tries to figure out exactly how it works, and begs for more when I’m finished.  Sometimes I think he’s going to break into applause.  Part of it is his inclination towards all things mechanical, but part of it is just a love of the idea that something new can be created.  So I set out a simple embroidery hoop, some muslin, and a little yarn for him.  He wanted to sew a picture, so we started with a smiley face.  He learned to backstitch in order to create a line of stitches (although not perfectly, as you can see!), and overall really enjoyed this.

 

 

May Day meant a little flower crown for the statue of Mary in our garden.  I used some leftover flowers from a lei, cut a crown shape out, and let M staple the flowers on.  He LOVES the stapler (totally supervised, don’t worry!). 

 Ok, I guess the garden needs a little work.

It’s a little big.

We read two beautifully written and illustrated books about Mary:

 

 

Art

Here’s a look at M’s Art Box for spring (which has recently changed into an Art Cart – more on that later).  It was full of things to make flowers and butterflies: 

Here’s a bit of his artwork: 

 
And, my favorite, a ribbon and flower collage on contact paper for Mother’s Day. :) 

I’m linking this post up to Preschool Corner and Weekly Wrap-Up; be sure to check them out!

Have a beautiful day! :)

 

 

Starting Down the Reading Road

M has been asking to learn to read.  Oh my.  I’m not sure how I feel about this. 

I know I can teach him, and I know he can learn… but I’m in no hurry to have him reading on his own.  There is so much out there that he is just not ready to comprehend in a healthy way.  I honestly don’t believe that reading at such an early age gives a child any sort of a real advantage in the big scheme of things. 

But, but, but I also want to encourage his love of learning and since this is what he’s interested in right now, we are slowly, slooooowly starting down that road. 

He already knows a handful of words and can pick them out when he sees them – dog, cat, Mommy, Daddy, on, off, of, no, go, pizza (haha). 

One thing we’ve been doing, and it’s a lot of fun, is carefully listening to the separate sounds in words.  For example, I’ll tell M to r—u—n to the w—i—n—d—ow (speaking very, very slowly, and clearly making each distinct sound), and he has to put the sounds all together and do what I say.  He loves this; at first it was a challenge, but he’s enjoyed it so much as he’s gotten better at it!  It’s a game to him, and something we can do just about anywhere, anytime… t—ou—ch  your n—o—se, and that sort of thing.

We did the same thing with the group of objects below:Find the b—oy, s—u—n, t—ur—t—le, etc.  When he’s done a few of these then it’s his turn to sound something out for me and see if I can pick the right thing.  This is harder than it sounds – he has a, let’s say, interesting way of sounding some things out, haha.  But it’s a great way to get him thinking about how individual sounds make up words!  He already knows which letters make many of the sounds.

I also picked up the first set of Bob Books at our library.  I think M will really like these.  I like how simple they are, and while I have heard that the line drawings don’t appeal to some children, I think they will to M.

There are a couple of online programs that I looked into… 

Progressive phonics is a free program, and gets a lot of good reviews, but I was irritated that in the earliest books the names are not capitalized.  This is probably a minor pet peeve, but M already knows that beginnings of sentences and names use “mama” letters.  I don’t understand the idea of not using proper grammar right from the start.  I also didn’t like the idea of having to print out all the books. 

Reading lessons is another free program, created by the same person who created the Kididdles website, which we love.  However, as the program progress, it uses printable books from the Reading A to Z website, which requires a paid membership.  It does offer options to this, but nothing that I found very realistic for us.

And, like I said, I’m in no hurry to have M fluently reading everything he sees!  So for now this is enough for us.

If you know of something we might enjoy down the road, I’d love to hear about it in the comments – thank you!

Have a beautiful day! :)