Letter C

Reflecting back on the week (read: looking at the plan on my fridge), I knew there were a lot of activities that we didn’t get to do.  So when I downloaded the photos from my camera, I expected to have a fairly short post.  I was pleasantly surprised at the number of activities we did do!

We did our C is for Clown pack from Confessions of a Homeschooler and this is the very first time that he did stamping.  I think from the depth of that dimple you can safely assume that he loved it!  He wasn’t very good at it but he loved it.

He concentrated hard on his puzzle, once again barely looking at the picture but looking at the numbers to put it together.

And he raced through his colour matching.

We had a lunch made of foods beginning with C.  As you can see, celery, carrots, cheese, chicken and a cheese dip which he didn’t like.  I thought it was delicious and had to stop myself from eating the leftovers from his plate!

On Friday we had two play dates so there wasn’t a lot of time for specific C activities as it was all about free playing!  I did manage to squeeze in baking a chocolate cake, though.  He VERY enthusiastically licked the beaters.  Before we added the cocoa and I read the rest of the recipe and realised we needed them again.  Doh!  Into the wash they went.  I gave both beaters to him and he gave me one back and said “mummy one, jazzie one”.  Bless him.

Much like the bear puzzle of Letter B week, this was our stand out activity.  On the tray there are all of his animals from the Fisher Price Zoo and some shaving cream.  After weeding (you’ll see that under Learning Activities) he was quite dirty so it was timely to play with something “clean”…that also made him more dirty.  Any who.  All the animals went into the cream and then I realised he wanted to wash them clean so I went and got bucket after bucket of water from our extremely full rain water tank.

And this was him by the end – quite a lot of shaving cream (and has been moved into the shade) after over an hour of cleaning his animals.  We took the animals inside and washed them with warm, soapy water in the bathroom to get all the shaving cream off and ever since then, he’s insisted that they come into the bath with him every night.  The animals have great long conversations of which I can understand very little!

We did more of our Circus Pack later on in the week and did some pre-writing practice.  He still occasionally writes with his left hand but he seems to be starting to favour the right hand now.  Both his paternal grandparents are lefties (or at least my mother in law would have been if she’d been allowed to be!!) so we wouldn’t have been at all surprised if he was, too.

We also did a Cat Pack from 1+1+1=1.  Remember last week when we were doing a puzzle like this and I thought it was too easy for him?  Well this puzzle went up to 20 rather than 10.  It was still too easy.  I’m going to snip the numbers off next time.  Up the top you can see the muzzle of his monkey.  Monkey joins us whenever we do “school” and has to sit at his own chair.  Sometimes he talks (monkey has a very distinctive high pitched “voice” that kind of sounds like the Queen when I try to do it) and he gets told by J to “be quiet. school time”.

He traced all the numbers (in different colours).

We matched the words to the pictures.  I helped him a little bit in that I did have to tell him what some of the items were (since we don’t have a pet!) and then we’d talk about what sound bowl, for example, started with and then he’d find the words that started with b and we’d narrow it down to the next letter or the last letter.  He did so well at this!

On Wednesday we had a public holiday for Anzac Day.  We didn’t go to the Dawn Service (although we were up before Dawn so we could totally have made it) so we made Anzac Biscuits instead.  Delicious!

I got this Mosaic Pin Board for $10 from KMart and he is quite interested in it.  At this stage, he lacks the concentration to do an entire picture.  It’s also one of those toys that he is only allowed to have under constant supervision because the pins are quite small.

I got out some of our plastic coloured bowls and cups so we could do some sorting by colour.

But his very favourite part of mosaics is pushing the pins out afterwards!  And in case you were wondering, we didn’t finish a picture.

From an achievement point of view, this is my very favourite picture of the week.  He is independently using the mouse!  He’s very slow and steady and normally takes his hand off the mouse to look at it and press the button but he can do it!  Please excuse my messy desk, I’ve tried to teach him to use the mouse before and he couldn’t do it so I wasn’t quite prepared for this photo.  The website he’s looking at is Starfall and we LOVE it!

Early one morning he found a stash of letter stickers I had put away.  I’d intended on using them to make a Montessori Moving Alphabet but hadn’t managed to find a container the right size (I did something completely different which you’ll probably see within the next few weeks when we get it out with him).  So before he lost interest, I grabbed a spare folder, some paper from the printer tray and a hole punch.  I wrote a letter of the alphabet on each page and he had to stick the alphabet sticker on the corresponding page.

He kept at it for quite some time although there are a LOT of letter stickers.  We’ll no doubt get this out again soon!

We had a few pages from the Ice Cream Printable made by 2 Teaching Mommies left in a random folder so we did some pre-writing practice.  I already knew he could matching up his upper and lower cases so I wasn’t at all surprised when he got all of them correct.  It admittedly looks a bit of a mess because he tends to go down first and then find the letter and have to go back up to match it!

Saturday was a lovely day so we spent quite a bit of time outside.  He is a very good helper with the weeding.  He does tend to pull up a few handfuls of just dirt but that’s all good.

My husband never seems to like what I cook in our slow cooker so this was my last ditch attempt at slow cooking for him.  J helped me make a Parmesan Honey Pork Roast  which was one of the best things (he thought) I’d made in the slow cooker.

He has quite a few sets of flashcards.  Some that I’ve made him (like the O is for Owl one you can see on top which I got from the Huggies Website) and some that we’ve bought or been given.  They were all mixed together so we went through and did them all, separating them out into their correct sets as we went.

This was another great idea I found from Pinterest – at a website called To The Lesson! Balancing marbles on golf tees!  This was way too easy for him but he has great fun doing it and has asked a lot of times since to play with the marbles.  I’m not too keen on the marbles bouncing on our tiled floors, though.  I think it may be an outside toy!

We spent a bit of time on the computer/iPhone this week.  There are really only two sites that we visit regularly online – one is Starfall and the other is Cookie.  They’re both educational sites.  Starfall is very much a letters/numbers type of website starting from just purely identifying the alphabet to reading and identifying numbers to doing multiplication and division.  Cookie teaches that sort of thing, too, but it also has stuff about science and animals so together they’re a great team.  We’ve paid the extra to get the bonus features on Starfall and I don’t regret it for a second – he adores that site.  And the iPhone app, too.  We did have a look at the Disney Jr website for a short amount of time, too.

The apps that he played this week were:

• Word Wagon by Duck Duck Moose.  This one he’s had for ages but he still loves it.
• Park Math also by Duck Duck Moose.  This was a new one which he is really enjoying.
• Dora Playtime.  Another newie.
• Teach me Toddler.  He played this for about two minutes and handed me back my phone saying “too easy”.  Um, what the??  I guess it was, in retrospect, since it’s all shapes, colours, letter and number recognition but really??  So I downloaded the next one….
• Teach me Kindergarten.  This one is much more of a challenge for him!  He’s really good at making words but the addition and subtraction is still a challenge for him

There were LOTS of activities that we didn’t do this week.

• Climbing at the park
• Catching a ball
• Counting with playdough
• Make a crown
• Play with Cotton Reels
• Read some C Books
• Watch the C is for Cookie DVD I borrowed from the library
• Hungry Caterpillar dominos
• Get out his Chuggington trains