February Activitites

February brought much nicer weather with weeks of welcome sunshine and temperatures around 11C or for our American friends in the mid 40's F. We decided to indulge in the half term break and spend time digging our vegetable patch in preparation for spring planting and Alex learned about important things like compost, soil enrichment and chitting potatoes.

Daily Intro

We continued with poetry in our daily intro time and moved on to some space themed poems in preparation for our introduction to the solar system. Most needed some revision as they were all written before Pluto was demoted to a dwarf planet. Here is the updated version of one poem that we are using to help remember the names of the planets.

Here are eight planets that we know.

Round and round the Sun they go.

Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars,

These are the planets near our star.

Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, too.

Neptune, so far we can't see you.

These are the eight planets that we know.

Round and round the Sun they go.

Phonics

We continued with the Jolly Phonics curriculum with plenty of opportunities to practice reading. I was very proud of Alex for having perfect recall on his phonics book which now has over forty phonic sounds.

I CAN SPELL THREE LETTER WORDS: This is a great flip book with three sets of letters, A-Z and then a single object picture for the child to spell. Once he has spelled it out with the flip letters he can turn the page up and check that his spelling is correct.

RHYMING WORDS FLASH CARDS: After having studied poetry for just over a month I introduced these rhyming cards as a matching game. They have pictures and words on one side and just words on the other. Alex spent time with sets of mixed up cards reading the words and then matching them to their rhyming partners. For days afterwards he would just come out with sets of words telling me which ones rhymed. He seemed quite impressed with the concept :)

LETTERLAND PUZZLE: I picked up some great puzzles and activities on a trip with some friends to a recent NCT sale. The letterland puzzle is 27 pieces and Alex as able to assemble it on his own without help. At the end of last year the concept of how to assemble a puzzle seemed to elude him but his brain made one of those fantastice developmental leaps and he suddenly got it. He now frequently asks to have various puzzles brought down to assemble on his own. I was surprised the first time I walked in and found that he had neatly divided the pieces into border pieces and centre pieces and was expertly assembling the "frame" of border pieces into which to fit the remaining centre ones. It had seemed at the time when I showed him this concept that he wasn't listening but it obviously stuck in there somewhere and came back out later when he was on his own working.

FREE WRITING: This is not a structured activity just something he has started spontaneously doing. After struggling to form the shapes of letters, even with an example in front of him, and months of doing worksheets that had dots to guide his writing, he suddenly just started free writing. We have several white boards in the school room, plus a white board book, a magnetic sketch pad, his blackboard surfaced desk and of course an endless supply of blank paper. I was greeted near the end of the month with mysterious letters, numbers and basic words appearing on any surface that could be written on. He would just wander in from playing in the afternoon and decide to write some letters or words for fun.

READING: After being somewhat reluctant to work on his blending and words, Alex has suddenly started trying to read anything he sees. Junk mail comes through the mail slot and he carries it in and starts picking out the words he can read. His great accomplishment this month was the word "chicken" on a pizza flyer, which he informed me was a very large word. I suppose it would seem that way since we have been doing mostly three and four letter words. He is now picking out the words he can read when I read stories to him and his brother. Proof once again that allowing him to progress at his own rate rather than forcing the issue has resulted in an eager young learner who is excited at the prospect of all that he can read.

Numbers

After a month of practicing writing his numbers and introducing the concept of the cuisinaire rods we moved onto basic math while still continuing increasing his range of number recognition.

CUISINAIRE RODS: Alex learned last month how to represent the numbers 1 to 10 with the rods. This month I introduced the concept of using them to do addition. We set out his focus mat and then I would give him a worksheet of addition problems. He would then take the paper numbers and symbols and take a problem from the sheet and set it out on the mat and place the corresponding rods over the top of the numbers. The next step would be to snap the rods together and count out the answer. He would then select the paper number for the answer and put it after the "=" sign and place the corresponding rod over the top of the number. The final step would be to take the snapped together rod and measure it against the "answer" rod to check that they are the same length and then to write the answer on his sheet. It sounds complicated when its all written out but the actual process is very simple.

NUMBER BEADS: My lovely husband didn't finish the bead frame on time for my homemade Montessori beads so we resorted to setting them out with flash cards on a focus mat instead. I also introduced the hundred square as a visual aid to help Alex as he learned to count to 100.

Science

We continued on the early part of the month with our study of plants and then spent some time on Alex's new hobby.

BIRDWATCHING: Ever since a pair of binoculars arrived as a free gift with our National Trust membership Alex has been scanning the garden for feathered visitors. I gave him a book on identifying birds and we set up a feeding station in the garden. He spent time each day for an entire week perched in the windowsill watching to see which birds would come to eat and bathe and identifying them in his book.

SOLAR SYSTEM: After half term break we spent the last week of February learning about our solar system through poetry, photos and stories. A big chart of our solar system now adorns the wall over Alex's desk and March will bring a planet by planet tour and the decorating of our ceiling with a hanging model of our solar system as well as a ceiling mounted constellation guide and the chance to go stargazing together. We hope to cap it all off with a trip to the National Observatory in London.

Music

Both of the boys enjoyed their introduction to the world of musical instruments. I still haven't had a chance to start teaching Alex piano but decided a good place to start would be learning about the different types of instruments. We spent an entire afternoon learning about percussion instruments through colouring pages, a video of a percussion band with solos by each of the instruments and our own percussion session.

Free Range Learning

Ethan obliged us with plenty of time for getting out the toys with little parts by falling asleep almost daily on the sofa before I even had a chance to take him up and try to put him down for a nap. I just left his dog dog and blanket on the sofa and when he got tired he would go curl up and be asleep within minutes.

I had picked up several different building sets at the NCT sale including a Mcano set and also a K'nex set. This month Alex repeatedly picked activities for his free range learning time that had to do with building and patterns. He spent time making space settlements with his blocks, putting together puzzles and making tanogram patterns. He especially loved the tanogram shapes and went from building them on top of a laminated pattern sheet to constructing them on his focus mat using the pattern sheet as a guide. We spent several days together building with the Mcano set and he amazed me with how quickly he was able to learn how to read the schematics for assembling the various models and soon was able to build a model by simply looking at the drawings without any help from me. He liked to look at the pictures of the various things he could make with the K'nex and worked his way through the little booklet building everything in sight and then started inventing his own animals. Our camera was having problems for almost a week so unfortunately I didn't get to snap any pictures of his Mcano and K'nex models but did grab a shot of this "space settlement" that he built and I wish I could have videos him telling me the long story about the aliens who lived there.

Summary