Sunday, May 29, 2011

Tot School

Tot School
Samuel is 16 months

The highlight of our Tot School week I have no photos off. Samuel finally loves his books. I have tried for so long to get him to sit and read a book with me and he has shown absolutely no inerest, until this week!! We read the same 2 books over and over and over and over again, but I don't mind I am just so happy that he will finally let me read to him!!!!!

Other activities that Samuel enjoyed this week

Stacking his crayons



Playing with the Autumn sensory box again



He spent a lot of time playing in the tent and tunnel that I set up for him.





Samuel also started enjoying trying to do his jigsaw puzzles this week. I found him sitting on his lounge with his puzles many times during the week.


He also spent a lot of time climbing up onto the big kids table to get into their work. He was so proud of himself when he would get hold of a pencil or crayon to do some drawing with!




My favourite has to be these photos of Samuel getting in on the action while the big kids were playing with the Wii. He thought it was great fun to stand on the fit board with the controller just like his big brother.


To see what others are doing for Tot School head on over to 1+1+1=1

Saturday, May 28, 2011

Learning With Liam







So, I am discovering that teaching Liam is VERY different to teaching Liana. Liana picked up reading and maths so easily that I never realised it could actually be hard to teach these things!! I kind of feel out of my depth at times, even after having been a teacher for many years. The problem is, that by the time the kids reached me in year 3 or 4 they already knew how to read and all their numbers. So here I am fumbling my way through trying out different things desperately hoping to find something that works with my little man!!

I have looked at some of the awesome reading programs developed by homeschooling mums but none quite meet all of our needs. So I have decided to take bits and pieces from this one and this one and this one and add in a few of our bits and work with that

I am not using the sight words just yet as it was getting too confusing for the poor boy to know when he should be sounding out and when it was a sight word. So for now we are sticking to just the phonics part.

Unit 1 is focussing on the short vowel sound of a. This unit will take us about 3 weeks to work through.

This is what we worked on this week.

Reviewing the phonograms


Matching lower case and upper case letters



Learning our "a" blend ladder


Finding the end sound for "a" words



and reading our 'ca' word wheel.




We also played lots of games and file folder activities but I keep forgetting to take photos. I am going to try to remember to take more photos this week, although sometimes it is impossible with two kids to teach and a toddler to keep out of mischief!!

To see what others are up to this week head over to
Preschool Corner {and 5K too}
and
Teach Me To Read Thursdays

Monday, May 16, 2011

Tot School

Tot School
Samuel is 15.5 months

We are slowly getting some structure back into our day after our 3 week Easter break. We continued with our Autumn theme this week and went walking to look at all the autumn leaves and collect some. I forgot to take my camera so have no photos of this but we had a lot of fun.

We also did some more dot painting using Autumn colours to decorate some leaves.


We have just started using Tot Trays. I put these out when the big kids are doing their school work in the hopes that Samuel will be occupied enough for us to get some work done. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

This week on our trays we had:

transferring giant pom poms

Putting pop sticks into a cream container. He loved this and did it over and over and over all week!

And, putting plastic coins into a slot.

He also spent loads of time playing with our new foam alphabet floor puzzle. He loved playing with this, mostly pulling letters out and scattering them throughout the house for me to try and find later.



We got a new puppy this week, so Samuel spent a lot of time loving on "Molly". I think they will be very good friends. I caught them today with Molly drinking her milk out of her bowl and Samuel down on all fours next to her with his face in it too!! I wish I had had my camera handy but given that he is allergic to cows milk I didn't particularly want to leave him there while I found it.



To see what others are doing for TotSchool head on over to 1+1+1=1

Monday, May 9, 2011

Tot School - Holidays

Tot School">
 Samuel is 15.5 months old

Despite school being back last week, we are still in holiday mode.  One of the benefits of homeschooling is we can start when we are ready - I definitely wasn't ready this week!  So not much planned learning for tot school this week, but lots of life.

Samuel enjoyed playing with the autumn sensory box I made for him.






I let him have a go on the blackboard with some chalk, which he absolutely loved.  It was very short lived though because he loved eating the chalk even more than drawing with it!


Samuel played with the playdoh for the first time, but wasn't too impressed it with.  He poked it a few times and that was about it.  He liked it when I cut animal shapes out of it for him though.




Apart from this he spent most of the week practicing his favourite thing to do at the moment - climbing.  He climbed play equipment, study chairs, lounges and anything else he could find.






For more Totschool posts head on over to Carissa's

Sunday, May 8, 2011

The Maze

This week was the last week of school holidays before we start term 2. At the start of the week we went for a visit to The Maze. There are four mazes and a spider web for the children (and adults) to solve as well as mini golf, koalas, kangaroos and emus and heaps of room to run and play. The kids absolutely loved it and we will definitely be coming back again.