Summer School

Lately I have been feeling really bad about the lack of school-type of activities I've done (or not done) with Dawson.  He and I used to have what we called "school" two or three mornings a week where we would work on letter recognition, days of the week, counting, shapes, calendars, crafts, etc.  But unfortunately in January when Carter started crawling really well, we basically stopped because Carter wanted to do everything Dawson was doing (and of course he couldn't) and this would frustrate and distract Dawson.  I have felt bad about it because I always thought I did a pretty good job, and then once we quit we just never picked back up.  Also, Dawson picks up on things really quickly so teaching him is a lot of fun, and he enjoys it! 

A couple of weeks ago, though I realized we had 12 weeks until he starts 2 day a week preschool in the fall, and that we should really try to start working together at home again. 

I decided to put it on the blog, so maybe it will hold me to making sure we do this each week for about 2 or 3 hours no matter what Carter is doing!  :)

So far, Dawson is really enjoys it! 

I wanted to have very simple goals, so I divided our 12 weeks into two 6 week sessions.  The first 5 will be covering material and the 6th will be review before starting new things.  Our goals for the first six weeks are pretty basic, but I want to make sure we have these things down pat 100% before we try anything too new!

First six week goals:

-Recognize all capital and lower case letters (Dawson can already do all his capital letters and a lot of his lower case, but we want to get this 100%)

-Begin site word recognition of simple words and family names

-Improve on coloring INSIDE the lines

-Improve on cutting on the lines (really he's good at this, I just want him to have a little more practice with it-he loves using scissors)

-Recognize all of his shapes even trapezoids (he knows all the basic shapes, but I want him to learn more like trapezoids, hexagons, etc)

-Improve on sequencing (big to small, small to big, etc)

-Improve on writing his name

-Memorize the days of the week (he almost has this when we sing the song-for some reason we like to leave out Wednesday)

-Work on counting higher

So far, in the first two weeks things are going great!  We are currently in the middle of the 3rd week.  Here are a few of the fun things we have done...

 

 

Glued Black Beans on a capital and lower case B

For each letter we read and sing the little songs/poems in this book that correspond and then Dawson uses a dry erase marker to circle all the capital and lower case of that particular letter on the page.  He loves that he can write in this one special book and erase it!

We reviewed the letter E and did egg matching where Dawson had to match up the capital letters with their lower case letter...here are a few of the eggs-I will say they don't all match up by color!

With the letter H we matched upper and lower case letters written on Hands...again all the colors didn't match up perfectly, so he had to look at the letter rather than the color.

He really enjoyed practicing writing F's and was really into everything we did this morning.  Look at all those awesome F's he wrote by himself before circling the F's on the page!

When we did the letter G we Glued string on top of the upper and lower case G's.

These are just a few of our activities so far, but Dawson is loving our school time.  I'm hoping we can keep it up and keep Carter happy and entertained while we do it.  I really have a lot of fun teaching Dawson everything, and each day Dawson can wait to show Daddy what we made/learned/did in "school!"