Poetry

I wanted to share (read: brag!) what D wrote today!  She even illustrated her poem!  Now, I might be partial but I think it turned out pretty amazing for a six year old!  Completely self-initiated and self-motivated, too.

Capitalization

D LOVES to write! Our house is littered with little hearts everywhere with love notes written on it!  It is funny how I even found one that said "I love myself"!  On days when there is non stop chaos at our house and I ask everybody to be quiet for a while D often writes out what she wants to say in a letter form and hands it over to me!  So anyways, it was time to work on some capitalization rules.  

We've already learnt to capitalize the beginning of sentences during the course of our All About Spelling lessons.  So we started to work on the other rules. I had read about these ideas on a few elementary albums.  The first is a set of command cards that emphasize proper capitalization of names.  I simply wrote these out on pieces of index cards.  D wrote down the answers using correct capitalization rules in her composition book.

The other fun idea was to combine the capitalization of pronoun "I" with proper names.  To work on this, I wrote down riddles based on familiar nursery rhymes.  The answers were on the back of the index cards.  D loved this!  Again, this idea was taken from one of the elementary albums I have.

I am linking this post up Language Linky @ God who has no hands  and and to Montessori Monday @ Living Montessori Now.

Pronoun Work

I have been really slacking in our language area though D's interest in Grammar and the function of words are at an all time high.  Between the work at home and all the co-ops and classes that we're attending I've just not had the chance to update our shelves.  So far we've worked to some extent on Nouns, Articles, Adjective and Verbs.  Anytime we read a story D always tries to figure out which work is which part of speech.  So recently she began asking questions about the pronouns we encounter while reading various books.  I quickly explained the concept of pronouns and flipped through some of the albums we have and put together this tray for her to work with.

All you do is take a poem or a nursery rhyme that the child is familiar with and replace all the pronouns with their corresponding nouns.  You also provide the actual pronouns so the child can work on replacing the nouns to make the poem sound right!

This is a great way to work on pronouns and D loved it!

Montessori Monday - Recap of last week

We weren't really motivated to get into the schoolroom last week after the long weekend, so we began with a nature hike.  Things picked up slowly from there.  We got to discuss plants and read some botany booklets and did some of the botany puzzles.  

On subsequent days we did get into the school room and began our routine works.

In Math, we worked quite a bit on the Stamp Game.  We covered Addition and Multiplication both static and dynamic.  D loves it when she creates her own problems for these!

Stamp game

 We are very fortunate to have a friendly homeschooling neighbor!  They were cleaning out and gave us these addition and subtraction worksheets.  You can clip on a blank sheet and work on solving the problems on the front.  Once you are finished, you just flip the worksheet and check your answers.

Front, where you solve problems

Back, where you verify answers

D likes these and I like these because D is ready for the Memorization work using the Strip Board and I am still waiting for it to arrive!  I ordered it two weeks back and hopefully we should get it this week.

In Language D worked on writing a few nouns each in the Person, Place, Thing and Idea category.  She loves writing right now and I am capitalizing on that!

D worked on the reading folders one day and started to write the "ay" sound words after reading the little booklet.  She gave up after writing this page!

We are also slowly working on Compound words.  I am using these Compound Word Puzzles that I purchased from Oriental Trading.  They are not great quality, but they get the job done.

I put out 5 at a time.  Once D assembles the words she copies it down in her Language Book.

We also worked on a few pages of Copy Work.

Of course M needs to copy whatever D does!

I found M one day working on the mystery bag while I was presenting some work to D.  She basically uses this like a puzzle, but she is pretty good at it!  After she is done, she picks it up and says - "Bye! See you tomorrow!" and walks away with the bag!

We did read a ton of books and also spent a lot of time outside enjoying the good weather.  Hop on over to read other Montessori Monday posts!

Re-cap of our work week - May 7-14

How do you come up with really interesting titles for your posts ? I am running out of ideas!

Anyway, here are some glimpses of our Math work last week.  One new thing we started last week is for D to record what she works with, where applicable, in her Math notebook.  I got this notebook from India, this is kind of the standard Math notebook that elementary kids back home use.  It is nice, since you can write one digit in each square.  You can also use graph sheets with appropriate sized squares for this purpose.

As you can see we've been working on skip counting by 2s or figuring out the even numbers up to 30.  We used the RightStart Abacus initially to do this, since the bead chains only go up to 4 and 8.  Then we used this hundred chart to count and stamp by 2's, 5's and 10's using our dot markers.

After D was done counting by 2's, 5's and 10's she wanted to cross out all the odd numbers!

Other than this we also reviewed the types of Quadrilaterals and Triangles.  We also reviewed the value for different coins and played with coins to find out how to use different denominations to arrive at the same sum.

In Language, we've been working our way through Grammar and D sorted the different types of nouns.

I just wrote these out using silver marker on black construction paper

D drew and labelled "things" she found in our kitchen as part of finding out how things are named using nouns.

One day we did this while playing, basically D marking using the Montessori symbols the articles, adjectives and nouns.  Now I can't seem to find this one paper!

Since D hates handwriting worksheets, we are practicing good writing and punctuation by doing copy work.  D would never like or be interested in copying random stuff, so most of our writing relates to the work we've been doing that week.  D does 3-4 pages per week and I can already see a tremendous improvement in her handwriting!  Here is a sample.

D has been reading about butterflies, frogs and bean plants from various books that I borrowed from our local library.

We just started back on All About Spelling.  With the weather being so nice we haven't had much time to continue the lessons.  My goal is to do at least 2 lessons per week.  We are going to start from the beginning of Level 2 since we took a break earlier this year.

We tried some wet chalk drawing on black construction paper and D enjoyed it.

We focussed on Mexico last week. I basically pulled out all our Mexico stuff from the North America Box and let D explore and ask questions.

D is slowly by surely entering into the second plane of development!  Part of this is exciting, but part of this is also that she will not choose works that challenge her.  She would be happily peeling off and dressing up the different paper dolls she has in her continent boxes all through school time, without ever touching any other single work.  Now with a 2 year old distracting me, it is very easy for D to slip off into only doing whatever she wants and not any work that provides the next level of development.  So we tried something new this week.  I created a task list/work contract that D is responsible for finishing.  Nothing fancy, I just wrote whatever were the next logical step to whatever she was already doing.  Of course there are things on there that I need to help present or give directions, but the onus is on her to get her list checked off.

So far this has been working ok.  D likes the idea of checking off, so she knows exactly what she needs to do instead of just going into the school room and trying to choose what she wants.  Right now, she still needs to be reminded that there is a task list that she is responsible for, but we working towards it!

New Story by D

Here is the latest by D:

In case you cannot follow her writing, here is the Story:

The Earth - by D

Once upon a time a bad witch was making poison! and her cat was very bad to other people.  One day she killed Bheemun and she ate him.  Then she threw up.

- The End.

Here is conversation we had after I read her story:

Me: I like your story, good job! So, I see you have drawn the Earth, what is that round thing next to it and why didn't you color that?
D: That is the Moon so it is white Mom.
Me: Why did you draw the Earth and Moon with your story?
D: That is because the witch is on the Earth and this happened at night.
Me: Oh ok!

So after sometime she gets me this picture to add on to the story!

The Witch!

Story writing was not prompted by me, D did it by herself after we were done with school!  I had to help her with spelling a few words, but I love how she has a beginning, middle and end to her story!  This is definitely a result of giving the child the needed tools and surrounding her with a rich environment and setting her free to create what she wants!  

Our last couple of weeks

We've been enjoying the great weather and meeting friends these last few weeks.  We've been doing school only when the weather has been rainy.  Here are a few pictures from what we've been doing, I did not take pictures of a lot of stuff, so there aren't many photos.

Plenty of Art with Oil Pastels - Our new favourite medium!

We attended a local spring festival, watched shearing sheep and visited the pets.  Isn't this a cool photo?!

We've been revisiting a lot of our old Math Trays, trying to revise old concepts.  D is working on the Teens in the above picture.

I've always wanted to do some graphing and data analysis with D.  This activity was sparked by one of the recent "Sid the Science Kid" episodes.  We sorted a bunch of buttons by color, shape or no. of button holes and tried to analyze that.  We estimated minimum and maximums before graphing and it was fun to see if our predictions were right!

Sorted by Shape

Placed it the sorted groups on a graph.  Since this was an impromptu activity I improvised by drawing X-Y axis on a piece of Cardstock!

By Color

Sorted by no. of Button Holes and ready to be graphed.  We only had two and four holed buttons so this turned out not such a great idea!

We have been working on a bunch of grammar and been doing a lot of reading. We've also been exploring our continent boxes and doing some sensorial work.

Winter Word Study

Now that D is reading quite well, we moved into Word Study.  Currently we are focussing on Syllable Counting and Compound Words.  We already covered a few basics while we were going through All About Spelling Level 1, so this work is not new to D.

As part of identifying syllables in words, I put together a few words that were winter themed. D will need to identify and sort 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 syllable words.  I don't have pictures of the tray, but you can download this here.

Once she is able to easily sort these, we will move on to breaking up each word into its individual syllables.  The plan is to provide a bunch of toothpicks and D will use those to break it into its individual syllables.

For Compound Word study, I created these penguin themed Compound Word cards, that D will match.
You can download that set here.  As always these are for your personal use only and if you share it, please link back to this blog!

Poetry and Christmas Tree

There are numerous blog posts all over the blog world on decorating a mini christmas tree.  It is an awesome fine motor work, appropriate for the holiday season and child approved!  We created one for our school too! I hunted and hunted for a decent mini christmas tree that wasn't expensive, but could not find it at any of our local stores.  Finally I bit the bullet and bought a live, small tree at our local Walmart for $8.  (Since it was live, I was kind of ok!)  Since our tree was really tiny and the branches were thin, I bought some mini ornaments from Michaels and luckily they were 50% off, so got a good deal on those!  After spending close to $10 total on this work, I had to get more value out of it for sure! So, I hunted for a nice poem to go along with this, got it from google and created our poetry tray. As always poetry is a big hit at our house!  So here is the tray and some action shots!

Both M and D worked on decorating this tree.

Here is the little tree after they were done with decorating.

Why are we doing Dwyer and All About Spelling?

I recently received a question from a reader who is a fellow homeschooler and a good friend, asking me why I would be going through the Dwyer Reading Scheme, when All About Spelling covers all the phonetic rules and wouldn't the same results be expected at the end of the AAS program?

The Dwyer Reading Scheme is exactly as the name implies, a Scheme for Reading.  To me, Reading  is a different skill that requires different thinking capabilities when compared to the Spelling skill.  In our house, the approach to learning is based on Montessori and it is widely believed in the Montessori world and I have found true in our case too, is that writing comes before reading.  So D has been in a sensitive period for writing for a long time. With all the exercises that we covered using the Dwyer Scheme, her spelling was purely phonetic.  Even with learning the spelling variations (Reading Folders work) in the Dwyer Scheme, I found that the child learns that a phonogram can be spelt differently, but the strategy of when to use what was missing.  I can give you two examples to explain this:

1. Double letters that are used to spell words like "off", "dress", "smell", etc.: Reading these words need no extra knowledge other than knowing the sounds "f", "s" or "l" makes and that two "f"s, "s"s or "l"s still make the same sound.  But while writing these words, how do we know when to double and when not to? This is the key that is addressed using the AAS program.  In this  program there are various rules that the child learns and is taught when to use them.  
2. The sound of "/k/" at the end of a word: "c", "ck" and "k" make the same sound, so while reading this does not make a difference, so nothing special is there in the Dwyer Scheme to address this.  Then again while writing and trying to spell a word which one do you use? Again AAS addresses this and teaches the rule.

There are many more examples I can give, but I think you get the point.  I personally am a fairly decent speller but my skills come from years of practice.  I don't know a lot of these rules for correct spelling and I am learning as we go along with the AAS program!  

So, since AAS seems to address all the variations and teaches all the rules, why not stick with just AAS, why go through the Dwyer scheme too? As I have mentioned before you need not know all these rules to read. It is enough if you know the phonograms, their variations and sight/puzzle words. So once you go through the Dwyer scheme, even though the child might not know all the rules to spelling, he/she can explode into the world of reading.  This is what happened in our case and D is much more open and confident in reading, now that we have gone through all the reading folders.  As for spelling, we completed, Level 1 in AAS and are now a couple of lessons into Level 2.  

Hope this explanation clears the need for use of both the Dwyer Reading Scheme as well as the AAS program.  I wanted to post my answer to the question on this blog so that it helps other parents having similar questions.  I am not paid or compensated by AAS, I bought both the levels from their site!  I just love this program for spelling as much as I love the Dwyer Scheme for reading!

I am linking this post up to Montessori Monday.

Another good week at our home!

We had another great work week at our home with D. She is moving along great with her reading and in Math we have covered all the four basic operations including exchanging at the bank and D loves this work. We will probably work on it some more next week and I will introduce the stamp game the following week. I need to go through Karen Tyler's culture albums and put out more work in that area. I also need to put out some holiday themed work for next week. So much to do and so little time! Anyway, here are a few pictures of some serious work this week!

More Stitching

Writing the different phonogram variations

Tool Box Work

3-Part Matching work

3-Part Card Label Matching and verifying using the Control Card

In addition to Montessori work, we also completed a couple of lessons from All About Spelling Level 2 and proceeded with abstraction using the Base 10 picture cards, which is similar to the stamp game.  We baked a chocolate pie for my husband's birthday.  All in all we had a fun week!


I am linking this post to Montessori Monday.