Cutting and ABC

Zelda has been loving her sissors all summer and has been getting pretty good. However, I have been pretty terrible at working on letters this summer and she has forgotten a lot of them and gets some of them mixed up. So since we were home for the day I drew out all of the capital letters on construction paper and got her to start cutting them out. She stayed with it till the letter H. 8 letters in one sitting is pretty good and she hadn't forgotten as many as I thought. I then taped a long piece of paper off my roll to the wall and glued on the ones she had cut out and put the remaining letters in a bucket with her sissors. I am hopeing that sh completes them some time in the next week and then I might start on doing crafts with animals that start with each letter since she really loves to do crafts right now. Zorro can join when he wants to and hopefully some of it will rub off on him to. 

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 

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.