Week In Review – March 5th

Reading:
We’ve been very excited about participating in the “Book It” program this year. I ended up buying a copy of John Lithgow’s “I Got Two Dogs” since Tornado Boy was so enchanted by the webcast of it. I laugh because he doesn’t read it, he sings it. The book came with a CD, but we’ve yet to put it into the CD player. The book is fun and a quick read. It’s in seriously heavy rotation right now.

Chick-Fil-A has a great promo in their kid’s meals right now. It’s a paperback book from the “I Wonder Why” series. They are really great books. We got the “I Wonder Why Horses Wear Shoes” version. It is chock full of information about horses. There is a ton of information to digest, so we only read a few pages at a time. There are six books in the series from Chick-Fil-A and a bunch of others are available through Amazon.

We’re starting to listen to some audio books in the car. Right now we’re listening to “Tales of a 4th Grade Nothing” by Judy Blume. Tornado Boy is enjoying it and listening more closely than I thought he would. Our local library has quite a selection of books on CD, so I’m hoping to make this a regular thing during our longer car outings.

Writing/Language Arts:
We’re still working on the lower case letters. I really should be more consistent with this, but it’s really not Tornado Boy’s favorite thing to do, so I try not to over-do it. We are working on his name more than anything else. He writes it fine with upper case letters, but I’m really trying to help him with the lower case version. I’ve also made a couple of worksheets with words that interest him for practice. His tolerance is about 3 or 4 words at a time and then he wants to move on to something else. I found another worksheet generator and I liked that this one had an option for larger letters on the example words. You can find it here. It’s nice that you can create whatever words that you want.

I introduced Tornado Boy to more parts of speech this week. We had talked about nouns some time ago, but I introduced proper nouns, verbs and adjectives this week when we played “Silly Sentences”. It’s sort of like a younger version of Mad Libs. Each card has sentences with blanks in them. The parts of speech are color-coded. The child picks a word of the appropriate color and puts it in their blank space. At the end, they read the sentences that they made. It can be played in a competitive mode (the parent judges whose sentence is sillier) or just used as reading practice.

Spelling:
I found a new resource through a friend this week called Spelling City. I love it. It’s free, they have stock lists, or you can create your own. There are lots of built in games that you can use. You can also do tests if you like. A premium membership allows you to track grades for a class on the site as well. I introduced the concept of alphabetical order to Tornado Boy and we played a couple of games where you drag words into the correct order. We did a spelling test from one of the beginner lists. I was sort of pleasantly surprised by how well Tornado Boy did. His strong phonics showed as he spelled the words by making the sound of each letter and then typing the letter. The hardest part for him is that he doesn’t know where a lot of the keys are on the keyboard. He seems to enjoy the process through. He’s been asking how to spell a lot of words lately, so this is a good fit. He really loves that he gets a certificate that he can show Daddy at the end of the test.

Science:

Solar System Puzzle

We got a new puzzle this week. Tornado Boy is still very interested in learning more about the planets. He picked out this puzzle during our trip to the teaching store. I was tickled to overhear him singing “How Many Planets” by They Might Be Giants (see video here) while he was putting the puzzle together. It’s nice to see him making those kinds of connections. We also watched a video on the planets at Brain Pop Jr (membership required).

Thinkin' Science

We also started playing around with the computer program “Thinkin’ Science”. I got this as part of a ridiculous deal at Hooked on Phonics. The graphics aren’t so hot, but Tornado Boy seems to like it. It allows him to explore some physics concepts (catapults, rolling objects, etc) and learn about scientific exploration. The program allows him to try to identify an object by learning about its qualities. Overall, it’s fun for him and it allows me a few minutes to cook dinner!

Miscellaneous:
I worked on teaching Tornado Boy the “Pledge of Allegiance” this week. Wow – did that drum up a lot of questions. There are a lot of massive vocabulary words in the Pledge and I wonder how many people really think about what it means. Tornado Boy is interested, but he’s a little intimidated by it. I laughed yesterday when we passed a building with a U.S. Flag on display and he said “Look, Mom – it’s the Allegiance Flag!”. He asked me to print out a copy of the words for him. He’ll often do this when he’s trying to learn the lyrics to a song as well.

Speaking of songs, we had two songs that were heavily requested by Tornado Boy this week. Both were from Disney rides. Thank goodness for YouTube. I like that they both have a very nice message. We’ve been listening to “There’s a Great, Big Beautiful Tomorrow” (from the Carousel of Progress) and “It’s A Small World” from a Disney CD that I have a LOT this week.

Arithmetic:

Creating the link between numbers and quantity - Doesn't he look old in this picture???

Math was huge this week. We spent a lot of time exploring and talking about it. I had a feeling that we’d go through a period like this with Tornado Boy once the concept of addition really sunk in. We’ve been working on the concept of “counting on” to help him get past using his fingers or having to have visual items in order to perform addition. He quickly leapt from adding single digit numbers to being able to add a double and a single. He sometimes has a harder time if the tens digit advances – like if I ask him to add 28+3, but generally he’s able to do it. He can count to 100, skip count by 2 to 20, by 5 to 50 and by 10 to 100. He is extremely interested in numbers right now and he’s asking a lot of good questions.

I really wanted to help him be able to visualize the quantities of numbers, so I brought out the abacus and the Base Ten blocks for the first time in a while. He’s using them reliably to count and to add. The Base Ten blocks are allowing for larger quantities, so I created a set of number cards like those used in Montessori schools that allow him to really understand how place value works. I’ll give him a number to create – like 172, and he’ll pull out the numbers first – 100, 70 and 2, and then combine them into one number and select the matching blocks that represent the number. I uploaded the number cards that I created. It’s a pdf file that you can print out and laminate. Feel free to download it and make your own copy for your own use.

It has been a very intense teaching week, but after the week of vacation, Tornado Boy was really excited about learning new things. I think I really need to find some good Kindergarten/1st Grade blogs to haunt for some fresh ideas! If you know of any good ones, please leave me a link. Thanks!

To see what other preschoolers are doing this week, head on over to Homeschool Creations!