March Activities

Daily Intro

We continued with poetry to follow the theme of our teaching reading some lovely poems about butterflies. We added doing a calendar with day, date, month, year and weather that we change each day.

Reading

At the end of March we completed the Jolly Phonics program and moving on to daily reading practice and word building games.

WWW.STARFALL.COM

This is a wonderful self-teaching website where children can choose from a selection of interactive stories to read. If they need help they can point and click on the individual words to have them sounded out. Alex begged daily to have computer time to read his stories.



WORD BUILDING TILES:

Alex enjoyed both free building words by sounding them out and using the activity cards to guide him in fill-in the gap style games. Jolly Phonics does not put an early emphasis on accurate spelling, instead encouraging children to first learn to sound out words which can generate some interesting spelling. After Jolly Phonics is complete Jolly Grammar begins teaching spelling rules and exceptions.



DAISY READERS:

Joelle kindly loaned us her Daisy Readers collection. They are excellent early readers combining early phonics and word repitition to encourage sight recognition. Alex enjoys the simple stories and bright pictures and read a new book every couple of days.

RHYMING CARDS:

Another game Alex enjoyed playing was matching up his rhyming flash cards. This led to almost daily renditions of "_______ rhymes with _________" as Alex started rhyming words free style for fun.

Math

After reviewing several math programs we decided to start a combination of Miquon math and Singapore math curriculum after summer holidays. While waiting for the text books to arrive from America via Grandma and Grandpa's visit in June I let Alex choose which things he wanted to work on. His big goal was to learn to count to 100 and so we explored place values.

HUNDRED BOARD

The hundred board is usually a small square board with tiles numbered 1 to 100 but we made a floor size model that Alex loved setting out as he learned the sequence and names of the numbers to 100.



PLACE VALUE CARDS

I made a place value box with cards from 1-9, 10-90, 100-900, 1,000-9,000. They overlay each other to make numbers, so 9,346 would be the cards 6, 40, 300, and 9000. Alex was very excited to be able to make "such huge numbers!".

COMPUTER TIME

A selection of math websites provided plenty of practice on basic addition skills.

Science

In addition to continuing our study of the planets we also explored the natural world around us. In observing that birds were eating the blossoms off of our plum tree Alex came up with the idea of making "scary aliens" to hang in the tree to scare away the pigeons. He selected materials from our craft box and came up with a great design. They worked so well the birds haven't been near the tree since we hung them.







Field Trips

We enjoyed a trip to the memorial gardens by St Giles church to look for bugs, observe what flowers were blooming and explore the grounds. Alex's favourite spot was the great oak tree that was reached by a hidden path. The last picture is my favourite, it should be on a poster for the joy of homeschooling and not being stuck in a classroom.









Summary

March was a fun month with lots of time spent outside doing nature walks and enjoying Spring first hand. Alex was thrilled to have his own log-in on the computer and selected a Lazy Town wallpaper for his background. I bookmarked a load of fun educational websites and he spent daily time self teaching as he moved from site to site which gave me time for some much needed rest as my pregnancy progressed.