Some Things We Did With What We Had

There are lots of things we've done over the years, but I won't mention them all. Many may come up on their own simply because we've still got children from baby up. But, I did want to share what did today.

I recently discovered that Jeremy, although knowing his alphabet and what most of the letter sounds are, does not recognize his letters out of sequence. So, we have several toys around our house with the alphabet. With one, it's magnets, I picked a random one and asked him what it was. If he got it right, he got to use that magnet. If it was wrong, it went back in the bucket. In either case, we said the correct letter, the sound and something that began with that letter. The other thing we did was to use letter blocks. I'd take one out at random and tell him the letter, the sounds and the two pictures that went with it. He repeated each and then was given the block to add to a tower.

During this time, Beth had a bunch of letters that stick together (a game from The Learning Center). She used that to practice spelling her words.

Next we got out some little rocks (the kinds you can buy in the craft section of the store for vases or such). We have three colors. First we sorted (a group things since this skills is already known for each). Then I put out a simple pattern for Jeremy and a complex pattern for Beth. They completed their patterns.

Beth also worked on math doing simple addition. Using the rocks again, she grouped out each number given, then combined them to see how many they made.

In each case, we worked only until they were tired of that particular activity.

Just before dinner, we looked up the nutritional value of the food items we had used in making dinner. This not only helped them to see which things their bodies need, but it got them excited and willing to eat some of the foods they normally complain about.

Some sites we like (though not used today) are: starfall.com, littlefingers.com, pbs.org (especially Arthur for the nutrition stuff and for SuperWhy for reading comprehension).