New Adventures!

I have decided that I want to update the blog weekly. So Friday.

 

I want to come up with a witty name for the Friday blog so I guess I will need to think on it a bit.

 

So the plan is: Every Friday make a new post covering our activities for the week. This may mean a few rather long winded posts but we will see what happens after a few weeks.

 

OUR WEEK IN REVIEW:

 

If you are following our Facebook page then you know that this was our first week back in the swing of learning AND that it got off to a rough start! Our week of learning technically started up on Wednesday but I did do an assessment of Gage on Monday. I have to take a moment to brag at how much my big guy impressed me! He is 3.5 years old and he knows his ABC's AND letter sounds, he can count to thirty and recognizes numbers up to 20, he also knows his shapes and not just the basic square, circle, rectangle etc., but pentagon, hexagon, octagon, and trapezoids. Plus he also knew cone. I hope I am not delusional in being impressed!

 

Wednesday morning Gage was anxious to get started. My bug pestered me ALL summer to do worksheets with him but we had so much going on! Anyway, we started with letters, I had him trace them to get started and back in the groove, we also discussed what sounds they all made before starting our next activity.

 

 

After tracing we put to use our letter sounds, we have worksheets that have pictures on the left side and you have to match them with the beginning letter sound on the right. Wednesday we did A-F and today we did F-J. Gage has really caught on to them. It of course takes us saying the word a couple of times but he has only gotten two wrong the first time so far. Not bad right?

 

Since he was all sorts of ready to learn on Wednesday and we were doing letter activities, he wanted to do our giraffe letter puzzle. I took the opportunity to incorporate color recognition with this activity and he named all the colors, including grey! (or is it gray? I never know the difference or why it is spelled two different ways.)

 

On Thursday, keeping Gage's attention was almost impossible so we did not do much. I was able to get him to sit down and do two worksheets though. The first was matching uppercase letters to their lowercase partner. The second was to match the name of the shape with the actual shape. I of course had to read him the words but he matched all of them correctly. 

 Today (Friday), I wanted to work on numbers so he traced 1-20 to start. Then with high hopes for my bug I pulled out some addition worksheets, I know he can comprehend addition as we have worked on it with him before, but today he just wasn't wanting to focus on that. With Gage everything has to be on his terms, typical 3 year old right? Since he wasn't wanting anything to do with math we took our first stab at file folder games. Honestly these were worth all of the time they took me to put together. Gage loved every minute of it and even when it was time to stop he didn't want to!

 

 

 I feel like this post isn't one of my better posts and I apologize for that, nap time isn't exactly nap time right in our house right now!

 

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Summer is drawing to a close!

With the end of summer upon us, I have started getting Gage's things ready for him to start learning some new stuff!

 

First and foremost I want to say that I am so happy that my big guy LOVES to learn! Every other day he is asking me to play a learning game or do worksheets with him!

 

Since summer vacation is almost over and we have literally done no new learning activities the whole time, I want to make sure that I have all my tools ready to go.

 

I started with three binders, and my subscription to education.com. I decided that I was going to have a binder for each "subject". We have one for Math, Reading/Writing, and then one for puzzles. Obviously the one with the puzzles in it are things like memory games, paper puzzles and mazes. Since Gage knows the alphabet, letter sounds, and number up to twenty his reading/writing notebook has a bunch of sight word tracing sheets and beginning reading books in it. His math book has preK and K addition and subtraction books.

 

 

I also added some fun new things to our "boredom book" shelf. I bought a book of file folder games and went through to find ones that would challenge Gage. So far I have 5 completely put together for him. I can't wait until he plays them! He loves games.

 Another addition to our "boredom" shelf is a bunch of activity bags that I actually found at the thrift store. They were complete as the are shown below. Each bag has an activity and the instructions and every tool needed for that activity is in the bag. I was thrilled to spend the $5 on all the neat activities for him to try.

 

 

I also revamped our "learning area":

The "desk" was actually a little tykes light table that I bought at the thrift store for $4. At first we didn't think we would be able to use it for its intended purpose because the cord to plug it in had been cut but Gage's uncle was able to repair that for us so now it has multiple uses!

 

 

In my bins I have every tool we will end up needing from scissors and glue to counters and alphabet bricks.

 

This is just the beginning of all the new things I will be doing with Gage. He and I are equally excited to get back into the flow of learning!

 

 

Thanks so much for reading!