Well, I didn't get much done today as far as housecleaning goes. I'm still motivated to get the house less cluttered though because I still want to decorate for Christmas starting Friday. What I did get done, though, was an almost complete lapbook for The Runaway Bunny which is the book we've been reading for the last few days.
For those of you who don't know, I'm planning on homeschooling Chloe. Okay, allow me a moment to brag about my kid. (All of us parents like to do that every now and then!) Chloe just turned 3 a little over a month ago and she loves the alphabet. Pretty much anything to do with words, she loves. Ever since she was a newborn, one of the songs I would sing to her (I'm sure off-key) was the ABC song. She could sing it all the way through including pronouncing clearly "LMNOP" by the time she was 2 1/2. Actually, I've noticed her singing it when she needs to comfort herself, lol. Just before she turned 3 we noticed that she could identify about 3/4 of the upper-case and a few lower-case letters. I hadn't planned on really starting any serious schooling until she turned 4, but I quickly realized she was going to leave me behind if I didn't get started!
I started researching online and asking other homeschool parents for advice. (I'm planning on joining a homeschool co-op after the first of the year.) During my online searching, I discovered File Folder Games. There are a lot of free resources online! These games are on several different sites and you can print out the graphics. The idea is to store them inside file folders. For example, one of the ones I made had some pictures of scarecrows, each in a different color. There are two of each color and one also has the name of the color printed on it. I pasted them to parts of a cereal box for more stability and then covered them with clear contact paper. I pasted the ones without words inside the folder then put one side of a velcro button on their bellies. The ones with the words, I put the opposite side of the velcro button on their backs. Chloe has to match up the the two scarecrows. Well, wouldn't you know, it's too easy for her, so she gets this sly smile on her face and pretends to guess all the wrong ones!
So I moved on to something more challenging. I found a File Folder Game that has her matching the lower case letters to the upper case ones. That is still a bit of a challenge for her, but I was surprised that she can match about half of them without my help. In the meantime, I also ordered a book called Before Five In A Row which is a preschool version of the Five in a Row curriculum. This is a literature based curriculum that takes a children's story book and you use it for five days in a row to discuss different things. For example, the type of art used in the illustrations. The Runaway Bunny uses both pen and ink sketching and water paints. This story is about a baby bunny who tells his mommy bunny he wants to run away. She has an answer for all the places he says he's going to run to and she will always be there for him. That brings up a mother's love for her child, etc. The book uses the word "Crocus" which is a flower Chloe had never heard of before. There are so many things to talk about when you read a book slowly and look closely at the pictures.
That brings us back to the lapbooks. As I was searching for more File Folder Games, I kept coming across references to lapbooks so I did a search for those. Wow! So many great, quality, free resources out there. The lapbooks round out the discussions that we have verbally. I will give examples. First you use file folders as well, but you can fold them differently and add more parts to them so they have extra flaps and such. They all fold back down to the original size so you can just file them away. The things included in our The Runaway Bunny lapbook are - the letter R and r and the word "rabbit", some story cards in a little pocket that tell "if/then" of all the situations in the story (the baby bunny says he'll turn into a bird and fly away, the mommy says she'll become a tree so he has a place to fly home to; so the pictures are of a bird and a tree and Chloe has to match them), a mini-book with a poem about a rabbit, examples of the two types of art used (I also added some of Chloe's art work), etc. We found different shapes on some of the pages so we talked about those, especially round (sphere, disc and circle). We went to Lowe's today and pick up some paint chips in different shades of green because the final colored picture in the book has several shades of green in it. I'm planning on helping Chloe make a collage to put in our lapbook. Can you tell I'm excited? As she gets older, she can help more with the cutting and pasting parts of the project. Eventually, the plan is for her to put her own lapbooks together.
I will eventually figure out how to add photos to this blog. Then I can just show you what I'm talking about!
No comments:
Post a Comment