Home Schooling Early Years: READING, Last Day of the Weekly Phonics' Book, Video

Home Schooling, Early Years: LEGO

Lego is great (especially if you find a nice hamper wicker basket that's a lot of hassle for 2 year old to open) Educational enough, too.

Home Schooling, Early Years: READING, Going Back

Oliver chose the book about Rocket as his first one in Songbirds stage 3, as he's really into space, or, to be precise, space machinery these days,  but the leap between this last one he's read in stage 2 was quite noticeable ( see the next post as to this mystery ) and he struggled a bit.

For this reason we decided to alternate between that and a bit of a revision, just reading the books from previous two stages. It's nice to see him read it just for fun, easy read.

Home Schooling, Early Years: Lets not Forget the Capital Letters

Although I still have to remind him here and there, from his reading Oliver knows about the capital letters as well  as the two main ways in which they are used.  Up to now I didn't ask O to write them, but since he seems to be getting used to all his lower case letters, I decided to introduce the Caps.

No particular difficulties, really. Writing definitely is the subject that lends itself the easiest to our O's logic. Wonder if he'll decide to connect the capitals to the rest of the letters, like he does it with lower cases?  I'm going to see what he does before specifically teaching him :)

Home Schooling, Early Years: Mental Arithmetic

Oliver and I have done quite a bit of 'counting' with counting sticks by now.  He doesn't quite get everything right while using those, but that doesn't surprise me as we kind of working with numbers 1-20 and back, and I think it's quite a bit to get your head around of, when you are 4.

However, seeing that Oliver enjoys working with counting sticks the most out of everything we do to do with numbers, I'm trying to gently introduce his fingers as substitute for the counting sticks.

This brings me on the subject of 'Counting in your head'. Not quite sure what's the best way to go about it. He knows how to count to 20 and back really well and quick.  However, it's much more difficult  for him to name a number larger by one and one smaller by one, for example when the numbers are out of sequence. So we are working on this and on the mental arithmetics which we can build from there.

I suspect that getting to grips with the idea of mental calculations is going to take us a while, past the very simple '1 + 1 (sweet),  examples.  Allowing plenty of time for this one to start sinking in properly!

Home Schooling, Early Years: WRITING a Story about Stinky Superman

This one from last week.  Oliver loved writing about his hero superman, will do some more this week.  O is starting to remember the letters and write them out from memory as opposed to copying them. This one is a smoother ride than reading for us at the moment, hopefully temporarily.

Home Schooling, Early Years: SONGBIRDS Phonics Reading, Stage 3

Today we have moved onto Stage 3, it's quite tricky, long words aplenty...