Alphabet Time, Sophie-style

It seems like it was just yesterday that Delaney and I were working on ABC's and ABC order. Sophie loves her alphabet, too, which I really credit to www.Starfall.com. I am certain that Starfall taught Hailey how to read ten years ago. I bought the kindergarten curriculum a few years ago when I started homeschooling Delaney, and Delaney still plays more.Starfall.com almost every day. The online books and poetry and music are wonderful, and the math games are fantastic. It is one of my happiest $36 expenditures every year and I HIGHLY recommend it. They have an iPhone/iPad app that is $2.99 and mirrors the ABC games on the website. I downloaded it for Sophie in January, and within about 2 weeks, she knew all of her letters and most of her sounds. It has ABC mazes to reinforce alphabetic order, "what is different" games for identifying letters and differentiating uppercase and lowercase, an uppercase/lower case sort, and lots of other skill builders for initial sounds and rhymes.

Since Sophie learned her letters so quickly, I decided to test her attention span and see if she was ready for my alphabet games.

I unpacked the Garanimals ABC and just set the board out on the floor. I showed her the alphabet cards and let her identify some of the letters for me. I asked her to find a few on the board, demonstrating how to match them up, and then I left her alone.

A few minutes later, I checked on her, and she was doing great.

 

 

She matched up fourteen before she moved on to another activity. If you ask her, her favorite letter is "Q".

Today, I pulled out the "rainbow" cookie sheet and the magnet letters. We put them in order together...we sang the ABC song (26 times ;) ), and she found the correct letters and put them in their spot.

She wanted to play with the little animal erasers that I use with bingo, so I asked her to find letters and she put animals on top of them.

I love her little voice. "Where aaaaaaare you, letter E? Right there!"

 I helped her spell "Sophie".

She thought she was pretty awesome after finishing all of this hard work. I did, too. :)

Our Little Home School, Week 1

I need to come up with a better name for our School. :)

We started our first "official" week of school yesterday. We actually started last Friday, because Delaney was as excited about all of the new stuff as I was, but that is kind of a weird time of the week to begin. :) The Starfall materials are great. There are tons of books and picture cards and various materials, as well as a very detailed teacher's guide to keep me on track.

We begin around 7:30am once Hailey has left for school and the girls are done eating breakfast. I am still figuring out the best schedule for us, but so far, we begin with calendar, doing a combination of the Starfall site and the wall calendar. We are mainly focusing on the days of the week and counting right now, but I will add more skills once Delaney develops more of an attention span for it.

I must be having teacher withdrawal. Setting up the room is always my favorite part.

We alternate between structured activities and choose-your-own activities, usually about 10 minutes or so each. After calendar, Delaney has been listening to songs on Starfall, or playing a game or two on the site. Once she has about 10 minutes of her own time, we move on to our daily letter.

I have been doing a daily (more like 2 or 3 times a week-ly) letter with her for about a month now, so she can begin learning sight words. It always has the same format:

She has to find and highlight her name, and the words "is", "we", "you", "I" and "love". Sometimes she loses patience with this, so we take turns being the teacher. She tells me what words to find, and has to tell me if I am right or not before I can highlight them.

 She is able to do this 100% independently now, so I will most likely change it a little bit next week and add the words "see" and "me".

The "Words I Know" wall...

We learned about the letter /b/. Delaney thought of words that begin with /b/ and practiced writing it. We also read lots of nursery rhymes, and made up our own. I really should have written those down...we are pretty funny. We played "I Spy" and riddles to figure out other /b/ words. She took an art break in the middle and drew a bunch of "juicy oranges that the worms are eating!" (See picture 2, top left. )

We made our pudding and counted, matched up bowls with lids, measured, used a timer and best of all, taste tested.

We had a tea party and counted lots and lots of spoonfuls of sugar. We played outside and on the swings, and looked for cumulus clouds in the sky.

I have a feeling that this is going to be a successful venture. :)

Alphabet Order

Delaney knows her letters and sounds, and of course the ABC song, but needs some help with the concept of alphabet order, so we worked on that for a little while this week.

One of our favorite alphabet videos from www.starfall.com...


How the Alphabet Got Its Order

We began with her alphabet puzzle and dumped all the letters out. First, we had an alphabet race to see who could put the most letters in the puzzle. I think it was a tie.




I mixed all of the letters up. She found "A" and "B". Then we sang the alphabet song about 24 more times so we could make sure of which letter comes next.

Around "L" or "M", Delaney started to catch on, and was looking for the next letter while we were singing, rather than after with a few cues.

And when you have sung the same song 20 times and you are running out of patience, sometimes it helps to pretend you are a puppy who is learning her alphabet order.

It's okay. I have a song all about a dog learning its alphabet. Sometimes you just have to go with it.

Hurray for making it all the way to the end!

We will continue to work on this for a while. When I taught kindergarten, I had these great alphabet rainbows. One side had outlines of all of the letters, and the other side of the board had just a line in the shape of a rainbow. The students started on the outlined side and matched up letters to the letter shapes. Once the students could do this successfully in less than 2 minutes, they moved on to the rainbow line side. The goal was alphabet order in less than 2 minutes on that side too. I am going to have to look for one of these mats...they were excellent tools. If I can't find one, I will just have to make one!

My goal for Delaney is to be able to put the alphabet in order independently in under 2 minutes. We will see how long it takes!

ABC Match

I found this great Garanimals ABC game at Wal-mart. I think it was only $8. It has SO MANY uses.

On one side of the card, there is an alphabet letter, and the other side has a picture whose sound begins with that letter. There are two sets of letters.


We have played this game several different ways. We have done a basic alphabet match on the board, and played a concentration-style game. We did an initial sound match, in which Delaney picked a picture, identified the sound it began with, then found that letter and placed the picture on top, and a concentration-style game with inital sounds as well.

I think there are about 15 other things I could think of that we haven't done yet, but will once she is older...final sounds with pictures, spelling and sounding out words, abc order, etc.

And all for under $10!

When I work with Delaney, I have to be very aware of her attention span limits. She has a pretty good attention span, but when I can see that she is losing interest or getting REALLY wiggly, I always give her the option to "play this again later". Sometimes she will settle back down and pay closer attention, and other times she is ready to be done. Even if we are SO CLOSE to finishing whatever we are doing, if she has been working at it for awhile and wants to stop, I do (for instance, the picture below). If I am forcing her to do an activity when she is done with it, she isn't going to learn anything except which buttons of mine she can push to annoy me.  The whole point is for her to learn something, so I don't worry or feel bad if we don't fully complete something to to degree that I wanted to. As long as she is making progress and we have fun, it is a successful activity!


And, P.S., when I say "REALLY WIGGLY", I mean to the point that things are getting knocked over or she is just running around. Two and three year olds are always a little wiggly no matter what, even if it is the best activity in the whole world.

It's Never Too Early...

...to start learning the alphabet. :)