I love summer.
We're always so busy on weekends, but it's just a more casual, anything-goes kind of season. I'm loving the weather. I'm loving our CSA foods again. And I'm loving that my favorite teacher bloggers are really stepping it up with their posting! ;) Thanks, ladies! I'm appreciating all this extra reading material. :)
Also this summer, the two Little Dragons karate classes that are held on Monday nights have consolidated to just one class since there are fewer students. So instead of 5:45, we now go at 6:15. Still for 30 minutes. That does buy us some extra time in getting home from work, changing clothes and getting out to class... and I wonder if we'll stick to that class time come fall? Our whole "schedule" seems to have shifted in the past few months. Even before school officially let out, we had slowly been staying up later, sleeping later, eating later, etc. By the time I get home, tend the garden for a bit, change clothes and get the kids situated indoors or out... dinner is often 7:00 or later nowadays! And kids are up till 8:30 or sometimes 9! On weekends, we often don't get breakfast around till 9:00 and the kids NEVER complain about that. Will still gets up around 7:30 but Sophie can sleep till 8 or 8:30. I'm not sure how I feel about it, but I'm kind of going with it for now. Summer living is much more flexible with this kind of schedule and I'm enjoying it. We're not skipping naps (usually) and the kids get enough rest for the most part. But for the first time ever, we're going to have some transitioning to do when school time comes around again. Our babysitter recently asked me if I want her to still put Will down for a nap with the younger kids and I said absolutely! He is sooooo not ready to drop it. If our plans or his body don't/doesn't accomodate a nap for him on a given day, he will be okay without it. But even an hour or two of "rest time" is valuable for him and when he does nap, it's often two to three hours long! I can see us putting him down for a nap on weekends even after kindergarten starts.
On a recent karate night, Sophie and I got out the letter magnets and practiced some more with letter sounds and introduced blending. Over the previous weekend, Sophie had received a belated birthday gift from the Pearson family (after they exchanged a game we already owned) and so we used pieces from that game as a visual for some simple CVC words. The game she received is called Ned's Head, which is essentially the same as our stereognostic bags from past Tot School play. Cute. And she loves it. So we played that a lot too on this night.
At first, we took turns choosing a letter, placing it on a magnet board and announcing what the letter was called and what sound it makes.
Then I put an object on the board that we were going to try to spell. I sounded out the word very slowly several times and enunciated the letter sounds. She chose the first letter pretty easily. Then the second. And then she wanted to just try out a bunch of letters to finish the word so we'd change up the third letter and sound out each letter on the board to see if it spelled "R-A-T". She'd point to the letters and give their sound and then laugh if the third letter didn't fit. :)
She'd say "Okay! Let's sound it out!" each time she put down a new letter.
Yay! Success!
We called this object a "man", so that's what we were spelling. She got the first letter this time and then wanted to keep changing the second two. I think she almost didn't want to get it right because she had so much fun laughing at the silly words we were making up that didn't make sense. It's definitely harder to hold her interest, so I just went along with her lead because it's still good practice sounding out letters and learning how they work together to make words... or silly, fake words.
"M-J-Z... that doesn't spell 'man'!!!" LOL
This game didn't last forever, but she did find it completely hilarious. :)
She got the second letter right... and finally the third. And then we took a break.
"M-A-N... that spells 'man'!"
Ned's Head
And here are just a few old pictures of a day that we were babysitting Mya & Stella. Mya loved our patterning game and both girls loved the graduating sizes puzzles.
Soph and Stella also played the Honey Bee Tree game.
No comments:
Post a Comment