As a background for my review, I’d like to share where Tornado Boy was with his writing when we began this program. He had been working on handwriting activities for about a year. He knew how to write all his letters and numbers, but his writing was not fluent. He required time and typically a model in order to create some of the letters and many of the numbers. When I approached the review, I wasn’t trying to teach him how to form the letters, but rather how to become more fluent in his writing.

I was given a copy of the PDF by Hand – Print software to review as part of the TOS Homeschool Crew. PDF by Hand is a software component that is an extension of the Peterson Directed Handwriting program. I was also given electronic, writeable/printable copies of the three Peterson print e-workbooks. The print workbooks that I recieved do have instructions on how to form the letters if that is where you’re starting. The print program is geared towards 4-5 year olds. The three books in the print program are available for review before purchase on the Peterson website. You can look at the books, but not print from them until you purchase them. If you go to the linked page, search for the PDF By Hand E-Workbooks For Print Writing section on the page and you’ll find links to all three workbook files. In order to fully understand what the PDF by Hand software adds to the program, it is helpful to have some basics on the Peterson program.

The Peterson Program:
Peterson Directed Handwriting is different from many other handwriting programs that I’ve seen in that it is really based in the mechanics of building good fluency in writing. The Peterson website has a lot of documentation for the extensive research that they’ve done into the handwriting process. One of the most interesting things for me was a video that explained why tracing letters with a pencil is such a bad way to start the writing process. In lieu of that, Peterson recommends a four-step process for learning how to write – 1)Explain and model the letters, 2)the student practices “air tracing” the letters, 3)the student moves to “finger tracing” on paper and 4)writing letters on paper with pencils. This methodology teaches the “muscle memory” for the child in order for them to be able to internalize the steps that it takes in order to make the letters.

PDF by Hand is, at its heart, a software that allows a person to be able to write on a PDF file with a Wacom tablet and pen. Tornado Boy and I used the software in conjuction with the Wacom Pen & Touch tablet. I think that for the Peterson program, having both pen and touch possibilities is important, as it allows the child to finger trace directly on the tablet and to see their letters on the computer screen. Most pen tablets only support pen input, a finger on the tablet wouldn’t record a stroke.

The first thing that I needed to do in order for Tornado Boy to use the Peterson program was to teach him to use the Wacom tablet. It wasn’t something that he had used before. I typically use it for photo manipulation and I don’t always have it hooked up to my computer. I used the built-in tutorials to teach him how to navigate using gestures and how to use the pen on the tablet. This process took about two hours of our time for him to understand how to use it and to use it well enough that we could use the PDF by Hand to start working on handwriting.

One of the things that Peterson offers that we didn’t get but I think would be helpful to a new writer is the CD of Animated Letter Cards for $17.95. This disc shows the child how to form all of the letters in three formats: print, slant print (pre-cursive) and cursive. This is a great visual way to show the child how to air trace the letters. You can find examples of the animated letters here. Peterson’s also offers print cards for $12.95 to show the steps to form each letter. I’ve found that having examples posted on the wall above Tornado Boy’s desk has been very helpful for him. It allows him to check the letter if he’s unsure of how to form it.

The PDF by Hand software:

This is a screenshot of the PDF by Hand interface. On the left is a column of available PDF documents. You can use your mouse or pen/tablet to select the item that you want to use. The right side is the “writing” space. You can control how the writing looks by setting the thickness on your pen tablet definitions. As the child selects a practice sheet, they can opt to save a finished copy on the computer or print the sheet before moving on to the next practice sheet. One of the nice things about this is that it allows you to see the child’s progress over time without having to save a bunch of printed sheets. The three Print e-books contain practice lessons as well as assessment tools so you can see your child’s progress in fluency over time as well.

A side-benefit of the PDF by Hand software is that allows you to pull in any PDF file in order to write on it with the tablet. We found this to be fabulous thing to have. This allows you to be able to write on any document numerous times. You can also save or print a copy of the document with the child’s writing on it if you want. This makes electronic documents infinitely re-usable. If you have access to Adobe Acrobat (not just the reader software), this really gives you a lot of flexibility in what you can add to the program for writing on the computer. You use the PDF by Hand software to pull in any pdf file and it will appear on the left window so that you can see a writable version of it’s pages on the right side. This worked great for me as a I had a couple of print workbooks that came with a disc version. We could then play with the pages without having to waste paper printing out copies. I really liked this!

Wrap-up:
We enjoyed learning with the Peterson method, but it definitely had its pluses and minuses. Here are some cons and pros for you if you’re thinking about the program:

Cons:

• The ramp-up time was substantial for me. I had to do extensive reading on the Peterson Website to really understand what the program was about and how it worked. I didn’t feel that the software and e-books on their own were enough for me to jump in and teach the program.
• While there is extensive research and support materials on the website, I found them a bit hard to find.
• The tablet can be hard to use as it lacks the visual feedback that writing with a standard implement provides. While this is intended in the program – the child is supposed to rely on what his muscles “know” about forming the letter, rather than relying on watching the pencil marks – it is a difficult adjustment. Think about how difficult it is to write a legible signature on a credit card pad in a store. Most of us do not rely on this type of feedback when we write.
• The PDF by Hand software is NOT compatible with Mac computers.

Pros:

• I do believe that there is a lot of validity to the research on the negatives on tracing. Tornado Boy did not learn to write well with the tracing program at his preschool. He learned once we looked how to structurally form letters.
• Rand Peterson, the owner of the company was exceptionally helpful and offers extensive support on his website.
• There are numerous product combinations available from this company. Once you understand how the program works, you can pick and choose what you want, or order the materials as a bundled package.
• I used a supplemental finger-tracing program on my Droid cell phone. This allowed Tornado Boy to practice finger-tracing letters and number anywhere we went. This methodology definitely did help build his writing fluency as it made the finger-tracing task more of a game. I really do think that this is a better approach to learning to write than pure tracing with a pencil is.

The PDF by Hand software can be purchased as a stand-alone item or in conjunction with the print or cursive workbooks that Peterson Handwriting sells. The cost for the software alone is $29.95. Bundled with the print software that I received, the cost is $75.00. That price includes the three print e-workbooks that cover material from just starting to learning printing through the slant-printing that is a pre-cursor to work in cursive. If your child is ready for cursive, there are bundles available for that as well. If you own the software, the workbooks are available separately as well.

We enjoyed learning with this program and will continue to use PDF by Hand as a part of our handwriting program. Tornado Boy has definitely made gains in fluency in the past month and is becoming more confident in writing his letters without having a model to look at.

If you’d like to see what other TOS Review Crew members think of this product, you can visit our Crew blog. Different crew members reviewed different parts of the program, so you can check it out if you’re interested in something like their cursive program.

Thanks for reading!

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

Disclaimer: I am a member of The Old Schoolhouse Review Crew for 2010-2011 and receive free products and services in exchange for a thorough and honest review. Though I am compensated with free products, I am not compensated in the form of cash for my reviews. My reviews will always reflect my honest opinions, findings, beliefs and experiences with the products and services that I have received.

We were on the road for part of this week, so our “official” school time was pretty limited. We did a lot of “car schooling”. I posted earlier in the week about our wedding trip to DC, Canada and Detroit, Michigan. The photo to the left was taken in Maryland during our trip. This mosaic sculpture was outside the restaurant where we had breakfast. Tornado Boy saw it from the window where we were sitting and wanted to go investigate after we ate. Unfortunately there wasn’t any sort of plaque on it and I couldn’t find any further information on it. The tile work was really neat, though. We’ve done foam mosaics and we once participated in a group mosaic tile at our local gardens, but we’ve never done a full tile pattern. I think I’ll put that on the bucket list for this school year. I’ve seen craft kits for them at Michael’s before. I’ll have to put a note on my to do list to save one of their coupons for it.

Science:
We attended a drop-in science class this week that was really awesome. I’ll post more about it on Sunday, but this photo is Tornado Boy holding a balloon that we were able to pass a dowel through without popping it. They had so many cool experiments set up for the kids to try out.
We also got a neat impromptu lesson in animal camouflage when we saw this Katydid on our door. If he was on the right plant, he sure would blend right in. His wings have veining identical to a leaf. We’d still hear him though, they make a tremendous amount of noise. Between the Katydids and the frogs around here, it is loud with wildlife at night.

Reading:
We turned in our Summer Reading program sheet at our local library this past week. Tornado Boy is super excited because he now has a “Star Reader” sticker on his window of the car. Unfortunately we didn’t get to Barnes and Noble yet and Borders was out of most of their free promo books, so we’ll have to try again later to complete those programs. I’m glad that we had participated in What We’re Reading for several weeks because it made it really easy to log the books that we had read on the worksheets – all I had to do was look at my blog posts.

Math:
Tornado Boy is working on memorizing his addition and subtraction facts. He can do some in his head, some on his fingers and for some others it helps to use the Math-U-See blocks. I had him do this Toucan worksheet this morning to try to evaluate where he was. He seems to know all of the +0, +1, +2 and doubles facts for addition. The remaining facts he is typically using a manipulative to solve. He taught himself subtraction, so we haven’t learned them in “families” of facts.
I’ve sort of put Math-U-See on hold for the moment and we’re mostly working on writing fluency at the moment. He can write the numbers, but he will sometimes reverse seven and the rest still require a some thought to print. He got the answers correct on this worksheet, and then I scanned it into the computer and we used the computer to do the color by number part.

Playtime:
Tornado Boy had fun doing a puppet show for me in the new studio at our Children’s Museum. They have a great selection of puppets, but he was disappointed that there was not a curtain for the stage.

He also visited the art studio for a bit of painting time. In the first one he was just experimenting with mixing colors – green, blue and yellow. In the second, he asked for my help in making a rainbow. He picked the colors using the ROYGBIV mnemonic – except that as usual, there was no indigo paint.

If you’d like to see what else happened this week, check out the “Weekly Wrap-up” at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

The Code:

Once I had the code in place, I set out to create my first secret message for Tornado Boy. I wrote the message out in Tahoma so that I could read it, and then I changed the font to Carta so that it was all symbols. I then typed a row of underscores above it for TB to write his letters on. You may have to adjust the size of the font and underlines depending on how large your child is writing. You may want to consider large rectangles, one per letter rather than underscores. Here’s a small copy of our first puzzle:

A Puzzle to Solve:

I’d recommend breaking up sentences (or just using words depending on the child’s skill level) into multiple lines so that the child has enough room to write successfully. I printed out a large version of the code that I’m going to laminate so that we can re-use it.

Once the code is set, all you need to do is remember the fonts that you used to create it and then you can print out anything that you want in code – spelling words, quotes, facts, fun messages, etc. Have fun playing detectives!

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

Tornado Boy is a big fan of pencil puzzles. He’s been doing dot-to-dot puzzles and word searches for the better part of a year. He recently discovered puzzles that teach you how to break a secret code where each symbol in the puzzle stands for a letter. The one above was on our coaster at a lunch at Red Robin restaurant. His writing is a little hard to read because he was using a crayon and the space is pretty small. The answer is “Chili Chili Cheeseburger”.

I love secret code puzzles because they promote several things like handwriting practice and problem-solving. Tornado Boy loves them because they’re fun! We have a couple of pencil puzzle books that have secret code puzzles in them. You can also check out a few at Squigly’s Playhouse.

Check out what other kids are playing at Childhood 101 and to see what other kids are working on for math, check out Math Links at Joyful Learner.

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

A lot of my friends are about to register their children for Kindergarten this upcoming week. I think that the “buzz” about it, plus driving past what would be Tornado Boy’s school (if we ever choose to send him there) daily has really hit home for me. I really was feeling like I needed to get things settled for us for this upcoming year.

I am tremendously grateful that a variety of situations led me to pull Tornado Boy out of preschool last September in order to give this homeschooling thing a try. I have learned an amazing amount this past year; about homeschooling, about my son and about myself. I am far more excited and confident about our first year of “real” (aka reported to the government) school starting in September. I also know that I’m making totally different decisions now about how to handle the upcoming year than I would have if I hadn’t had these past eight months to get used to the idea. Had I not had the time, I likely would have used something like K12 or perhaps Calvert School as a base curriculum for us. I know now that something that is structured so that you’re doing all subjects on the same grade level will likely not work for us. I also know that I really prefer a unit study type of curriculum that will allow us to more deeply explore subjects that interest Tornado Boy.

I looked at a lot of different possibilities for how to handle next year. Our laws really give me a lot of freedom. I basically need to just send a notification that I plan to homeschool along with my qualifications to do so. I am now completely responsible for my son’s education. That is an amazing and awesome responsibility. I never pictured myself being at this juncture in life, but now that I am, I am truly excited to begin this journey. One of my biggest concerns is that I make sure that we will continue to have a social group for my son as most of the people his age will be headed off to school. The fact that he’s an only child really makes this vitally important to me. We’ve made some connections at a local co-op, but opted for a set of homeschool enrichment classes for children his age. I’m hoping that exposure two days a week to the same kids will be a positive thing for him. We’re also going to continue to have him be involved in at least one sports class at a time. I’m hoping that he can continue to do that with some of the kids that he’s currently friends with.

I filled out my official paperwork this week. I have yet to submit it; but it’s complete for when I’m ready. I also registered for another homeschool conference so that I can continue to network in the community and learn more about educating my son. The other big step was that I ordered all of our curriculum for next year. I also decided to go ahead and start using it now. Since we’ve pretty much just been learning about whatever interests Tornado Boy at the moment I figured that there’s no time like the present to try and get into a groove and see how a more formal environment will suit us for the fall. Here are the items that I’ve selected:

Five in a Row – for our language arts studies. I selected this to be able to continue in the unit study vein, using classic literature for the basis of our studies. We have not received our materials yet for this. The reviews that I’ve read have been so favorable, so I’m hoping that we’ll like it, too. Books are such a huge part of what we do every day, so hopefully it will be a good fit. This is supposed to include some geography, social studies and art along with the reading.

Math-U-See – this is a change as I had planned to continue with RightStartMath. Given Tornado Boy’s struggles with addition and his success with place value, this seemed like a potential good fit. I only ordered the Primer level so that if I decide to go back to RightStart, I’m not out too much money. So far, Tornado Boy is far more excited about Math-U-See. He seems to do really well with video content, so I think this will be right up our alley. He loves the manipulative blocks that come with the set. I’m really excited to see how this goes over the next few months.

All About Spelling – I like the “hands on” nature of the curriculum and the way it really uses phonics as a basis for spelling. This is how Tornado Boy naturally spells words – he sounds them out first, and then gives us the letters. His spelling is very good, but he needs work on the vowel sounds. I’m pretty excited about getting started with this.

Science – Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding – I choose this for a couple of reasons. We did a LOT of science this year as it is what Tornado Boy really seems to be interested in. I think that we will find this to be a lot of review of what we did in the past year, but much more in depth than we had done. Also, it was really inexpensive. If it doesn’t work out – no harm, no foul.

Handwriting Without Tears – I’m planning on using both Sentence School and My Printing Book. I’m such a huge fan of this curriculum. The entire line of products – manipulatives, songs and workbooks are incredible. They really make it fun for the child to learn to write. Good stuff.

Those are the major choices that I’ve made. In some ways I feel like I may be going overboard and towards too much structure. We’ll just have to see how Tornado Boy adapts. My major goals for the year are that he makes social progress – getting more used to the social aspects of school; and that he continues to really love to learn. He is so positive and self-motivated right now. I really want to make sure that we continue to light that fire for him.

What do you have on tap for the upcoming year?

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

It’s been a LONG week and mama is tired. Tornado Dad and I have both been somewhat under the weather. Nothing too bad, but I have been dragging every night. We had a good school week, though, and we spent a lot of time outside in the beautiful Spring weather. Here’s what we focused on this week:

Reading:
We’re back to working on Hooked On Phonics Master Reader after taking a bit of time away from it. The combination of this program and the see-thru bookmark for visual tracking has made a huge difference in Tornado Boy’s reading fluency. The hard part is the vocabulary in the program is getting very advanced. Tornado Boy can read the words (things like invention, attention), but he doesn’t know what a lot of them mean, so we’re spending a lot of time going over what the words mean. We got some help this week from our babysitter who is a teacher. She did a reading assessment with him so that we’d know what level he’s reading at now. It’s good to know, but I’m really struggling because his reading is so far ahead of his writing and drawing. Lessons that are designed for what he can read are way ahead of what he can do from a fine motor skills level. Balance can be tough to find since his skills are so uneven, but he loves to read – anything, everything, everywhere we go, so I have to work with it.

Math:

We spent most of our math time this week working with money. I find it amazing that Tornado Boy is still struggling with basic addition, but concepts like money seem to come pretty naturally to him. We spent a lot of time sorting and counting money. We brought out the cash register and played “store” – thanks for the nudge, Natalie! We used counting on techniques to add money. Brain Pop Jr. has a couple of good videos dealing with money if you’re a member.

We also had fun using math (especially fractions) to make biscuits together this week. We found a new gluten-free flour mix that I’m pretty excited about it. It’s supposed to measure cup for cup like standard all-purpose flour. That’s a big deal. Tornado Boy was pretty excited about it as well. He had fun helping measure the ingredients, rolling out and cutting the dough. Somehow I forgot get the camera out. I’m always nervous with him in the kitchen because he touches everything and there are too many things that can be dangerous. We’re really trying to work on respecting things and asking for permission before touching in the kitchen.

Science:
We did a lot of science this week. We continued working on our Beetle lapbook. Tornado Boy still is very insistent that ladybugs and lightning bugs do not want to be called beetles. I find that very amusing. We talked a lot about metamorphosis. This concept really seems blow his mind. I’m thinking about getting one of those butterfly kits so that we can watch it happen.

We also talked a lot about Spring. We’re using the Download n Go “Spring Surprises” unit study as a basis for our study. We spent a lot of time outside watching Mother Nature putting on her grand show. Our flowers are starting to grow and some of our trees are in bloom. It’s been really fun to play in the yard and around town and look at all of the beautiful flowers. Unfortunately my floral photos were less than stellar. It’s very hard to try to photograph things and watch runner-boy at the same time. We’re growing our own little salsa garden inside the house. I dragged the AeroGarden out of the attic and we planted tomatoes and peppers last week. Tornado Boy is beyond excited about “his garden” and he checks the plants every day. It’ll be a few months before we have fruit, but I’m pretty excited about having some fresh tomatoes. Maybe I can convince him to try a few.

Fine Motor Skills:
We’ve finally completed the lower case letters lessons from Handwriting Without Tears. I cannot say enough good things about this program. There are still a few letters that Tornado Boy needs reminders on, but overall he is now able to form all of his upper and lower case letters. He’s starting to ask how to spell things and do some writing on his own now. He needs a lot of work on alignment and spacing for words, but he’s pretty excited about it, so I’m just letting him write that stuff as he wants for now. Here’s our writing practice of all the little letters from today – I made an example or two for each letter and then he did his own:

Gross Motor Skills:
Tornado Boy started a new set of swimming lessons this week. We have a local swim school that does intense classes for two weeks and they’re just awesome with wiggly kids. I’m really, really pleased with our instructor for this session. Tornado Boy is making quick progress this time. He has no fear of the water, so making sure that he can deal with it safely has been a priority for us.

The timing wasn’t great, but we also started a sports variety class in the past week. Each week the kids will learn some basics of a new sport. This week it was basketball and Tornado boy had a lot of fun.

I’m enjoying seeing Tornado Boy try out new activities and seeing what he likes. We also got to spend quite a bit of time at the park this week, so he had lots of chances to run around with friends, play tag and hide and seek. Thank goodness for nice weather!

To take a peek at what other preschoolers are doing this week, hop on over to Homeschool Creations.

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

Tornado Boy is 4 years, 6 months old

It’s been awhile since I participated in the Preschool Corner, but I always love having these posts to look back on, so here we go!

Art – We learned about blending colors this week. Brain Pop Jr has a great free movie of the week discussing primary and secondary colors, color blending, shades and tints. There are lots of activities available if you look under the movie on the site. I’m not sure when they change the movie of the week, so get it while it’s hot!  After we viewed the video we experimented with blending colors using the Do-A-Dot paints.

Color Mixing with Do-A-Dots

We also talked about symmetry during art when we cut out hearts in honor of Valentine’s Day. We got new scissors this week and they were a huge help. The old ones were too stiff and had been very hard for Tornado Boy to cut with.

Cutting Out Hearts

Music – I’m trying to incorporate more music into our days and into our lessons.  This week we heard the funniest song in the car (on XM’s Kid’s Place Live) called ”There’s a Carp in the Tub” by Robbie Schaefer.  We loved the song so much that we came home and looked it up.  You can listen to the song through that link – there’s a little control on the upper right corner of the page and you can forward to it.  There’s a coloring page here -it’s the cutest carp that I’ve seen!  We also found this site that has a lot of pictures of different kinds of goldfish and koi – types of carp. 

I also introduced the concept of music in a round - that’s a really neat music “game” that allows the child to control four children singing “Frère Jacques”.  They can control the timing of when the next child enters the round.  I was very surprised to find Tornado Boy singing the song later in the day.  The fact that it was in a different language didn’t seem to bother him in the least and he already knew the tune of the music because he has an instrumental version on his lullaby CD that we play each night.  Props to my friend, J. for introducing us to the Poisson Rouge site - very neat stuff once you figure out how to use the interface.

Science – Tornado Boy asked to play with some binoculars this week. I have no idea where he even heard of them, but Tornado Dad had a small set that he was willing to let us use. We experimented with looking through them the correct way, and then turning them around backwards to see the effect (this made things smaller). Tornado Boy carried them around for most of the day on Wednesday. Sid the Science Kid also ran the episode “Grandma’s Glasses” so we talked about their “Vision Investigation” exercise from their website. I wear glasses sometimes, so I let him look through mine and talked about how even though it makes things blurry for him, I can’t see very much without them (or my contacts) on.

Checking out the Backyard with Binoculars

...and seeing lots of these on the house.

Games – We were given the game Pipeline as a hand-me-down from some friends.  We still haven’t played it “by the rules”, but Tornado Boy loves to build with it.  The different sections of pipe allow him to build in different directions.  He seems to like this much better than his blocks.

Building with Pipeline

Math – We discovered a great new show math-based show called “Team Umizoomi” on Nick, Jr.  It’s cute as can be.  They cover a bunch of different math-related topics on the show.  This one is well-worth setting the DVR to catch it.  It’s on at 11:30 AM here.

We finally had an addition breakthrough this week.  I feel like we’ve covered every other possible math topic for the longest time, but addition was a real challenge for us.  Tornado Boy understood number sentences and could count on with manipulatives, but would give you a blank stare if you asked what two plus two was.  The past week or so, that changed and now he can reliably add any two numbers that add up to ten or less.  I was pretty excited about it.  I think we can probably pick back up with RightStart Math now.  I’d been waiting for him to grasp this concept for a couple of months now.  I didn’t want to move on until he really was understanding it.  We’ve also been practicing writing numbers. I finally showed him how to make an 8 using two smaller stacked circles since he was struggling so much with that number. It really seemed to help him.

Number Writing Practice

Language Arts – We did a lot of letter practice this week.  We’re still struggling with some of the lower case letters, but they’re getting better all of the time.  We also talked about rhyming words this week.  We read Is Your Mama a Llama, and practiced writing some rhyming words.

Letter A Practice

We did some work on practical skills this week as well.  Tornado Boy does a good job with helping to fold laundry, clearing the table and putting his clothes in the hamper.  I’m curious what other things you have your preschoolers learning.  Any ideas?

Thanks for reading!  Find out what other Moms are doing with their little ones at the Preschool Corner at Homeschool Creations.

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

Mat Man

Tornado Boy As Mat Man

One of the things that came with my package when I bought the Handwriting Without Tears package was a baggie that contained “Mat Man”‘s hands. I honestly hadn’t given them too much thought, except to wonder why’d the give me the hands, but not the rest of Mat Man. When the sales man handed them to me, they sort of sounded like an afterthought. It took me a long time to realize that I already had the rest of the stuff to make him. Most of his body parts are the wooden manipulatives pieces that we used for form letters. I thought it was kind of hokey. One day a couple of weeks ago I asked Tornado Boy if he wanted to make Mat Man and he said “Yes!”. We put the song on (it’s on the CD) and built him. Tornado was thrilled. Now he wants to build Mat Man every day. He also wants me to take Mat Man’s picture every day. I find it all pretty amusing. The song is catchy, though, so I can see the attraction. It’s a fun way to teach a child parts of the body if they haven’t learned them yet – or if they just enjoy the process like Tornado Boy does.

Here’s a link to the instructions for Mat Man from the Handwriting Without Tears website. The words to the song are included as well. Now you can make a version Mat Man, too! I’m hoping to take Mat Man to the next level this week and have Tornado Boy start drawing him. We’ll see how that goes!

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

Since the little man was in a fishing mood, we watched a Brain Pop Jr. video on ocean habitats and talked a little bit about vertebrates and invertebrates. Tornado Boy spent most of the time trying to reach his own backbone without much luck. He’s been so fascinated with dinosaurs, fossils and skeletons that I think he was really struck by the fact that he has a skeleton inside himself, too.

We picked up a new math-based story book – this one is called Even Steven And Odd Todd. It’s an amusing story about two cousins who like very different things. It’s a big hit here. Tornado Boy will now consistently name 2,4,6,8 and 10 as even numbers and 1,3,5,7 and 9 as odd. He’s still struggling a bit to identify two digit numbers. Understanding the pattern is just not quite there.

Today we did more writing practice. C and S are causing the most problems by far. The facts that they start somewhere besides the top and that you have to  draw backwards are definitely a challenge to remember. This site has great free worksheets that you can create for yourself. You can do letters, words or sentences in various sizes and in upper or lower case. Great stuff if you want to focus on specific writing and have a guide to work from. A sample worksheet is shown below. They also have all kinds of other printables that you can snag as well. Definitely worth the bookmark!

We were heavily into playing the past couple of days and one of the games that we played was Uncle Wiggily. I had remembered it from my childhood days. The game has been simplified since then – it now has one stack of cards and only 100 squares on the board instead of 151. It’s a good post-Candy Land game as it requires some counting. Reading is optional. Each card had a rhyme on it telling you how many spaces to move, but the number is also there on its own at the top of the card. Tornado Boy seemed to really enjoy it and even awarded himself 100 (imaginary) gold medals for beating me twice in a row. The kid is darn lucky when it comes to games of chance.

We tried to follow up the game by reading a story from Uncle Wiggily’s Story Book, but that didn’t go nearly as well as the game. The book was written in the early 1900′s and I found it rather hard to follow. Oh well, back to Even Steven we went.

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Mommy Portrait by Tornado Boy - October 10th

I could not be more pleased. Not only is it a very recognizable figure, but he did it on his own, without prompting. The difference that I see in his fine motor skills, confidence, and desire to draw and write in just six weeks is significant. I am so excited for him because it opens up such a world of creative possibility for him.

I credit Handwriting Without Tears for a huge part of our growth in the fine motor arena. Their products are fabulous. The combination of the manipulatives and their practice lessons is so powerful in building confidence. They boil down writing capital letters into very simple components – long and short straight lines, and small and large curves. It makes the formation process so much more manageable. We used the wooden pieces this week to practice forming letters:

HWT Wooden Letter Pieces

We also have a mat that can be used with the wooden pieces to give them a boundary, as well as laminated sheets that show how to form the letter, plus give a picture of an item that starts the letter. My new favorite thing from the HWT package is this great practice sheet. There are several different styles in the pack, but my favorite is the one shown below. I love that it shows an example for the letter, uses a dot to signify where to start the letter or number, and has the gray bounding box to help guide the child on the scale of the letter. Great stuff! There are also pages in the packet without the example letters and some for practice on letters that start in a certain area, like top left corner.

HWT Writing Practice

One fun little thing that we picked up from an online example was to give Tornado Boy’s left hand a name. We call it “Hank the Holder”. It helps to remind him to hold the paper while he’s writing. He’s gotten much better at slowing down his writing and that’s helped immensely in improving his formations.

I have a feeling that picking up and moving all of the little glass marbles while playing Mancala pretty much daily probably isn’t hurting either. Just a fun little stop on our tour of the “finer” things.

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.