Very First Attempt at Reading

My oldest, who will be going into kindergarten this coming fall, has been working up to learning to read. I really didn't know how to go about this...I never thought we would get this far. I figured if she knew some of the letters and numbers before kindergarten we were good. We still have a lot to learn...specifically the lower case letters...which made this exercise kind of hard for her since the cards I had were in lowercase. But REALLY-for her first attempt EVER at reading, I think she did an amazing job!

We will keep working on it, and who knows where she will be in 5 months when school starts! :)

St. Patrick's Day

We're pretty festive at our house-any excuse to celebrate!

We have a traditional drink for St. Patrick's day...Shamrock Smoothies.

Ingredients:
8oz lime yogurt (I like key lime pie)
1 kiwi pealed
1 cup frozen green grapes
1 peeled, cut, and frozen banana
1 cup baby spinach
3/4 cup limeade.
Blend it all together and WA LA! Delicious!

We also worked on a craft. All you need is paper-white and green, scissors, and water colors.
Draw two circles on the white paper to form a wreath shape. Then paint it like a rainbow. When it's done drying, glue on clover shapes...which I am a pro at cutting out! (Don't laugh...I know they are terrible!) Then cut out the circles.

Preparing for Kindergarten

We have been kind of changing our focus with preschool. Suddenly my children learned their ABC's on their own. (Not quite sure how other then the Letter Factory DVD I mentioned in a previous post.) But they have them all down! So we have been working on getting ready for kindergarten...My kids really need to work on cutting...and it doesn't help that I have hid the scissors since the day they were born. (They have such pretty red hair!) So cutting is a new concept for them. I found THESE awesome scissor skills work sheets and my kids love them!

We have also been working on some fun crafts. We made these dangley hearts. All you do is cut strips on multicolored paper at different lengths, and staple them at the bottom. You need two equal size pieces of each paper, stacked in order, going out from ONE long white paper. Then just fold each set down and glue them together.

We've also been doing a lot of worksheets. I find it the best way to reinforce all of the letters that they have learned. Plus they think it is so much fun to have "homework!"

We've been working really hard on writing our names. My oldest has been doing it for awhile now, but my youngest, age 3, is just getting it. She did a mighty fine job here!

The letters G and H (Hearts and Valentines)

I don't have a whole lot to say about the letter G. I kind of just did my normal thing.

We also started H!

For H I decided to focus on hearts since it's almost valentines day. We made hand made cards for grandparents, and also their dad. (It's the tradition in our family that the dad gets his girls something and the mom gets her boys something and visa verse. We don't have boys...so there you go.)

The cards were super fun to make, and I think they are so much funner to get than a store bought card. :)

Below in the top left corner you will see the foam stickers that I bought-just at Walmart. They were fun, and some of them sparkly! -A girls favorite thing! And the girls could put them on themselves.

Then we went to work on Valentines for all of the 17 cousins that live in town. My oldest wasn't too happy about having to write her named 17 times, but it was good practice!!

(Not to mention that kindergarten screening was today, and she did EXCELLENT except that she wouldn't write her name, and told them she only knew the T. She has a little bit of trouble with her S's, and only gets them right about 50% of the time, but she does amazingly for a 4 year old I think! :) ...and she CAN write her name!)

Then the best part...assembling all of that Candy into bags!!

TA-DA!!

The letter F and Fire Safety

A lot of the time I start out by reviewing past letters. We have also been working a lot on recognizing upper and lower case letters. Here I wrote the letter on the board, and had them draw lines to the correct corresponding letter.

I introduced the letter F. We learned what it looked like, and what sound it makes. We also talked about different words that start with the letter F.

This is a cute craft that I found HERE. We also tried some "Letting the kids do their own cutting." This is an area in which I need work! :) It's scary when you have girls with beautiful red hair to let them play with scissors.

We watched this video as a family, and then talked a lot about fire safety. I lost my camera for a few days and so I didn't get pictures of this, but we basically did all of the things that they talked about in the video, where to do, what to do, how to stop drop and roll, not to hide from the firemen, etc. The girls really thought this was fun.

Letter Factory DVD

*Click the picture to go to the link*

My kids have been watching this DVD for about a week now and they love it! It's an educational video that teaches the alphabet and the sounds they make. In the week that my kids have been watching it I have noticed that they know a lot more letters than I have taught them! They also want to tell me the sound everything around the house makes! It's been really fun! I highly recommend it!

Link

To your right I added a link to a really great site that lets you print off preschool and kindergarten worksheets for free. They have lots of topics! It's under "My Blog List." I will be using several of these in the near future! :) Happy Learning!