Friday, June 20, 2014

Name recognition

Zelda is good at knowing her name in writing anywhere. Zorro knows how to tell which is his name and which is Zelda's. I have been teaching then their names written properly but am learning that it is important for them to know both the capital and lowercase because Zelda wants to type her name and the keyboard is all caps. So... Today I gave them a paper with both ways and asked them to coulor and then trace on the other side. Zorro didn't really have the attention span but he did draw a bunch of o's 




Thursday, June 12, 2014

Number 5

Today I was reading a book about Chasing God while Chasing the kids. And in it it had a challange about managing time to do the things that mattered to you. It also quoted the verse saying that we should count our days to gain wisdom. I only have one year till Zelda starts school. That's not very many days left. I need to remember that. So today I took a few moments to think about "preschool" I found all the numbers 0-9 in our magnetic letters and put them in a bucket. Zelda picked out (without looking) the number 5. So here is what we did...
1) Ran outside and did five jumping jacks, big steps, normal jumps, and ran to five poles/trees. They are both able to count to 20. Zelda can get to 30ish. But they are not good at count to a specific number they always go past. So it was good practice to pay attention to what the are saying instead of just saying something memorized. 
2) Pick 5 Dandillions. Zelda did this with no problem and was done in 10 seconds. Zorro brought me three. Zelda went and got two more for him and he helped me count them.
3) Decorate the number 5 with markers and glitter. Since it is nice outside and I really don't like glitter we took the little table outside and did it on the porch. 
*Zelda was working on colouring her 5 in and Zorro traced the number over 3ish times. Zelda didn't finish colouring because Zorro took out his glitter and that is just far more fun than markers :) 

I had hoped to get them to pick the 5 out of a group of numbers but they were done with me telling them what to do by then so I let them get back to playing. 
Hopefully I will get to the other Numbers in the next few weeks. We shall see what I think of. I like to keep things simple, moving, and short.