What do we do in the hols?

Mommy started word recognition with Abel beginning with sight words and word family 'at'. Hopefully we can sustain these little activity to get him started with reading.

 Lots of craft follows…our first attempt at scratch art..

Nap is a must for growing children and of course, for mommy to take a break. Thank God whenever all three nap about the same time.

Homelearning resource

My friend started this website some time back for moms and dads interested in home learning with a hands-on approach. There's loads of printables to make your own learning materials and ideas on how to interest your kids. Now they are having a give-a-way. Find out more from them @ http://myplayschool.net.

Keziah's first story...

We got a little bored in the hols and Keziah has been sketching quite abit so Mommy decided to just clipped a few sheets of paper to make a blank book for Keziah. She immediately jumped on the idea of writing a story. We started with the zoo..

 

However, interest was shortlived and we started to slow down. Keziah decided to change the theme to the farm. Don't ask me what's the relation between tortoise and the farm. Maybe coz she saw tortoise at a fish farm we visited.

 To encourage her to write, Mommy did most of the difficult spelling and tried to encourage her with those simple ones that can be phonetically sounded ones. Finally, her completed works!

We have stopped our letter learning for sometime and since it's the hols, we got back to it again!

Random craft and word chart (from myplayschool.net) and word recognition by matching pictures to the lyrics of "Five Little Monkeys" which the kids loved!

Next we explored the story about "The Mitten" and the kids loved it and Keziah could read it on her own again and again. Got ideas for some games from homeschoolshare.com.

We threaded out mittens and decorated them with stickers. Can you guess which is Keziah's and which is Abels? Simple colour matching and sizing activities.

Memory game to see who could remember which animal went into the mitten first and Keziah did her little sequence book. 

Craft time again. What can be an easier way to tell them what mosiac is than to get hands-on to make their own creation. For $1.60 each piece, it's cheap entertainment and it also trained them on precision of pasting as the pieces were really quite small.

When Mommy's home, they dedicate all their art pieces to Daddy…Hmmm...

Fine motor skills - writing

It was time to get Abel to train up his control over the use of pencils. He was diligently joining the dots with care and colouring with great precision to ensure he kept within his lines. Colouring was not his favouritie but surprisingly today he finished colouring 3 buckets decently well. Cheap simply book to keep him occupied with some interesting activity.

Blending fun..

Got this idea from another mommy! Saw these magnetic alphabets at the pasar malam today and grabbed 2 sets at a real steal of $2.90 each. We'll see if this makes it more fun as we embark on blending to make words when we write our diary!

Dear Diary

To encourage Keziah to write, we started this dear diary some time last year but had been very infrequent in updating. It was only this last hols that we manage to date down more things. Keziah started to really like looking back at her diary of what she wrote.

Homeschooling….Letter H..hhhhhh

Holidays had been play for most time. Abel had great fun with his train set and always finding innovative ways to involve his toys. Now his train can transport a ball and next it can transform to a plane. Otherwise, he changes his track to a rollercoaster by using one of the carriages to raise one end of the track.

We had stopped for some time with our alphabet and we were back to H.

Some songs we sang:

Hairy Hat man whispers "hhh",
whispers "hhh", whispers "hhh"
Hairy Hat man whispers "hhh"
He never talks too loud

With Christ in the vessel we can smile at the storm
Smile at the storm, smile at the storm,
With Christ in the vessel we can smile at the storm
As we go sailing HOME
Sailing, Sailing, HOME (x2)
With Christ in the vessel we can smile at the storm
As we go sailing HOME

Simple craft collage to make different type of homes…house and a flat…

 Keziah's piece...

 Abel's piece...

We also explored some memory games with our old flashcards and surprise our boy can remember a sequence of 5 animals and Keziah can do 7 quite easily. We also tried to find out where some of these animals stayed.

Finding our heart and punching holes and threading…our little Keziah wrote her little love note..

 

For Keziah we did this count in 5s catepillar to help her with counting in fives as a prelude to her learning to read the analogue clock beyond the hour and half hour.

Ffff…...

For the past week or so, we had been working on letter F. Phonetic sounding as we began…fffff….

We started with FISH and with none other than a very familiar song:

Once I caught a fish

One, two, three, four, five,

Once I caught a fish alive,

six, seven, eight, nine, ten,

then I let it go again.

Why did you let it go?

Because it bit my finger so.

Which finger did it bite?

The little finger on my right.

Craft time was simple with tearing of paper into strips to make the seaweeds and into squares to make the pebbles for our little under the sea picture/aquarium. Mommy cut some fish, star fish and jellyfish and we counted them as we pasted.

Keziah somehow didn't like the idea of tearing and insisted on cutting her seaweeds out. So here we have the neater version. We talked about some words starting with f and tried to sound them out as we wrote them down. Keziah added in the eyes and decided that she wanted to draw in turtles as well.

Not missing out on our memory verse. For this week, it's John 3:16 "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whoever believes in him should not perish but have either life." We fished the fish with our magnets and the two kids got into a squabble who had more. Keziah was then tasked to arrange them in order.

Next, we went on to be frogs, hopping around and the kids just enjoyed it. Found this song and the kids loved it. You can add on the activity by have 5 paper frogs with different number of specks on each, keeping two the same. Then, we can get the young one to find which two were exact twins, which had most and which had least spots. Last but not least, simple subtraction of (-1) from 5 down to 0. Keziah enjoyed the picture crossword.

Never missing out on the craft. Scissor skills for Abel who cut squares of shades of green and pasted on the frog template. Keziah decided that she wanted to colour and looks like she's really grown in terms of colouring, using different shades to blend.

 Last but not least, a little talk about the life cycle of the frog.

Letter E - short vowel

We started back on our routine of letter adventure. Seriously there's really few short vowel letter 'E' to walk about. So we played around with EGGS one morning for breakfast. Trying to guess which egg was cooked and which was raw.

Cooked egg spins fast 

Raw eggs wobbles due to inertia since the yolk is in motion.

Nothing it's better than eating it up!

Incidentally Mommy found a dvd on How the egg becomes chick from the library titled Magic School Bus Cracks a Yolk.

Books we found too at the library:
The elephant story
If the elephant wore trousers
Eggs and Chicken
Deers - to know about elk

We sang some silly ELEPHANT song and rhyme:

Eddy Elephant

(Tune: Oh the grand old duke of York)

Here comes Eddy Elephant

To talk to you and me

He just says ‘e…’

He just says ‘e…’

He belongs to Mr E.

The Elephant

Here comes the elephant,

he moves so slowly.

His trunk swings to and fro.

He’s so big,

he can’t even jump.

He sits down with a great big thump!

Next, we explored our mystery ENVELOPE to find our memory verse for the week!

More to come….

More letter d and water cycle

Today we listened to the song "Raindrops keep falling on my head". Wasn't quite an appropriate song for little ones coz there were just too much words. Nonetheless we enjoyed the song. We tried to create drops using a syringe. It was definitely fun for the kids however we couldn't quite see the ripple effect. Next time would have to try out using milk in the bowl and probably some coloured water in a bigger syringe and see if we could observe the ripple effect with the bigger droplets.

We dripped a few droplets on a paper and asked the kids to predict what will happen. Following, we tried to mimic the life of a water droplet as it evaporates, condenses and falls back to ground in a water cycle. The kids had so much fun with the drama and giggled so much.

Next is craft time to create our own water cycle. Mommy cut out a cloud and Abel did some hole punching followed by threading. 

 Keziah was busy filling up her raindrops with words beginning with letter 'd' and cutting them out. Ok, she needs to improve on her handwriting but getting better with sounding words out. We learnt some new blends: -ing, -ong, -oo, dr-.

Keziah and Abel also created a sun out of crepe paper which were pinched into small balls to exercise their finger skills. Last but not least, was to piece them all up. Keziah decided to add in some sand and waves drawing with a little help from Mommy in blending. Finally, Mommy filled in the terms.

Letter D and homecraft

Mommy started a series of phonetic sounds activities with the kids, targeted especially at Abel to revise his letter sounds as well as to get Keziah to blend/spell simple words beginning with them. Now, we are at letter D. We did a treasure hunt round the house for things starting with 'd' sound. Then a look at the word chart to see how many we have found. 

Using these objects, Mommy tried to play some linking memory games with the kids. Keziah caught on quite quickly but Abel can only do a few when he's interested.

 This time we talked about different breeds of dogs. Which are those that we have seen and which was their favourite.

 Sang some simple songs

We had been doing memory verse for some time with the kids and now taking the opportunity to fit our letter hunt as well as word recognition, we did a jigsaw to assemble the verse. Mommy introduced the "ing" sound to Keziah.

Nothing beats reading! Mommy also borrowed several books from the library:
1) Usborne beginners - Dogs (non-fiction book which the kids found it rather dry)
2) It's a quacking time: Tells of how a family of ducks waited for a duck egg to hatch. We learned about their lifecycle from egg to duckling to adult duck.
3) A dog called Rod: A girl who desires to have a pet dog imagines how her dog which she named Rod would be like, unlike all other dogs.
4) Baby Dragon by Amy Ehrlich: Keziah loved this book. It tells of how a baby dragon waited for her mother who left in the afternoon to visited his grandma to return the next morning. How children should never wander when asked to wait eventhough it may seemed ever so long.

A dog puppet: Simple to do. Mommy cut out all the parts and got the kids to assemble and glue them on a paper bag with some guidance and a picture of the completed work. Not too bad but certainly needs perception of space which Abel was better at. (Top: Abel's and Bottom: Keziah's). We wrote the word "dog" at the back and used it for some simple puppet play and singing the "Doggy with a Bone" song.

Keziah pulled this craft which we bought last year. It was a 3D puzzle of the Red Riding Hood scene. All they had to do was to punch out the styroform pieces and fit them by matching the number on the corresponding pieces. We tried to tell the story with it to see how much the kids remembered of it from when we last read it.