I purchased a kindergarten curriculum which has kind of backtracked us into a review of alot of stuff that we already covered last year. I'm not sure if I was just ambitious last year, or if I was just flexible enough to let Iz take off and charge ahead. But this year, I've had a hard time budging from the weekly laid-out scheduled curriculum that is already written in the planner that it came with. And it was frustrating me, because it has just been too much of a review. I started voicing this to people, and then finally realized....DUH! You are homeschooling! You can change things up as needed...in fact, that is one reason WHY you are homeschooling, so that you can tailor things to Isabel's needs.
I have no idea why it took me so long to realize that it was okay to move ahead as needed. But at least I am there now! So while Isabel was starting to blend sounds and read short words, books, and sentences last year, we haven't done any of that until this last week when I realized we could "go ahead". And she's definitely been waiting for it. This week we've been working on a short list of "sight words" and she's easily got these down pat...in fact, she just discovered that these "sight words" are everywhere, and that she KNOWS them, and that was a very exciting discovery for her!
In other school work, we did our first lapbook on Thanksgiving, and it turned out to be a great success. I had been kind of leery of these lapbook things (for some reason unknown to me)....but kids just love them. She really got great satisfaction out of putting it together and learned quite a bit in the process! (that's the whole goal, right?) ;) I've got more of these planned for the future! I discovered the Homeschool Share website and found great ideas for lapbooks there.
For Advent, aside from our regular school work, I've put out some fun Montessori-inspired activities.
This can be two activities in one:
Mystery Bag (needs 2 people) They both study the objects in the basket, then one chooses one object that she puts into the bag, while the other person keeps their eyes closed, then tries to figure out which object is missing from the basket.
and
The Sense of Touch Mystery Bag: All items go into the bag and she puts her hand in, holds an object in her hand (don't peek) and tries to figure out what the name of the object is just by the sense of touch. (we did this one first, before she had even seen any of the objects and she guessed them all correctly!)
I had an old Christmas card with all these little scenes from the Nativity story, so I cut each scene out, laminated them, and told Isabel to put them in order then tell the story of the Nativity.
(Sequencing and story comprehension).
Spooning Christmas color pom-poms...an old favorite.
Snowman addition. She loved this, it was too easy for her unfortunately, but she really liked that she could use a dry erase marker to write the answer (I had laminated these). Need to make more!
That's just some of the fun we are having here. I've got a whole list of Advent activities, things for the shelves, and crafts and I'm just refreshing activities during the week and checking them off my list as we go along! This time of year is so much fun!
