For our first week back to school after Christmas break, we continued with the Letter H. I had a few more activities planned for the week, but we ran out of time to squeeze everything in. Jenna was very anxious to get back to school. I'm glad to see she's enjoying it rather than me trying to force her to do something she doesn't want to do. :)
Since I got an iPad for Christmas, I'm able to use it now for school. So instead of dragging the laptop downstairs for the kids to do their letter games on it, I can just use the iPad. I LOVE it!
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| Jenna and Grant playing Starfall on the iPad. |
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| Hippo lacing card |
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| Wikki Stix |
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| Size Sort |
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| Since it's way too easy for Jenna to match uppercase letters with the uppercase words and vice versa, I decided to switch it up. She now has to match the lowercase letters with the uppercase words. At first she didn't want to do it I think because it's a bit more challenging for her, but with a little help and encouragement she figured it out. |
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| I love these building games! It's actually quite challenging for her. I cover up all but one row at a time, so she only has to focus on a few colors and patterns. Then we move on to the next row. I think when she just looks at the whole thing at once, it's very confusing and overwhelming for her. |
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| Number writing practice - Since she's four, I wanted her to try to write the number four by herself with the dotted lines. Not too bad! |
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| Grant will sometimes pull things off the shelves to work on while I'm working with Jenna. Today he decided to sort the colored bears into the correct cups. |
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| I've been impressed with how well Jenna does with the letter sound pages. I say the names of the pictures and then she sounds them out on her own to figure out which ones to circle. For the most part, she is able to do this completely on her own. It's so neat to hear her sounding out the beginning sounds in the words! |
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| She LOVES these letter mazes. They're rather easy, but since she enjoys it so much, I don't mind her doing them each week. It's nice having fun, easy activities mixed in with some more challenging ones. Plus, she gets to pick out the stickers to use, which she thoroughly enjoys! |
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| Do-a-dot markers |
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| Grant wanted me to take his picture after he decorated his geoboard with some rubber bands. :) |
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| Color matching game - I figured she'd be able to do this activity just fine since the color words are the actual colors of the words. I was just impressed with how neatly she lined it all up. Usually when she does these puzzles, they're scattered all over. |
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| Jenna came up with this idea for making the letter H. She grabbed the stick and had Grant lay down next to her. Very creative! |
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| Jenna's letter H on her geoboard |
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| Coloring page using a marker |
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| We pulled out the playdough to make the letter Hh. I originally wanted her to work on rolling the playdough out like a snake, but she was working really hard at just covering the letters (and doing some rolling), so I let her do it her own way. |
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| She made the letter H using her paint bag. I probably need to add more paint. The lines don't show up too well and it doesn't seem to hold her interest for long. :) |
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| Patterning |
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| For her ABC book, she filled the letter H with heart stickers. |
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| Poke page - she did a great job and was very meticulous about poking lots of holes on the black lines. |
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| For Christmas we got her a dot-to-dot book for numbers 1-10. This was her first experience with doing dot-to-dot, so it took some practice and explaining, but she did it. |
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| Letter H puzzle |
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| Cutting practice - she got a little sloppy with this page, trying to rush through it to get to the next activity. |
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| A new app I downloaded on my iPad that I LOVE for the kids is called Letter School. It gives you practice writing capital and lowercase letters and numbers 1-10. There are three "rounds" for each letter. The first round, dots appear at specific points on the letter to show you where to start and end. You just touch the dot and either bubbles, train tracks, chain links, or some other fun image scrolls through how to write the letter. Then the second round you have to use your finger to trace over the white line and another fun image follows your finger as you go. If you go off the line, it slides back to the beginning and you have to start again. This can be very frustrating for Jenna, but it's good practice for her to slow down and to try again. Then the third round the white line disappears and you have to trace the letter from memory. It gives you a few tries before the line pops back up to remind you of how it goes. It's very fun, interactive, and great practice for her! Did I say how much I love this app?? ;) |
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| Letter writing |
