Since sounding out words and attempting to read books is occurring more and more, we began to look at and attribute sounds to specific blends of consonants.

Introduction to Beginning Consonant Blends, Blend Wall Cards by 3 Dinosaurs It seems to work better for us to do it once, maybe twice, a week – doing a few days work at one time. This is not something I’m willing to make happen everyday. The only math we did this week was graphing the weather each morning with our calendar activity.Week-in-ReviewĬollecting Data, Calendar Activity from RoyalBaloo This, however, is the beauty of “doing school” from June to June on a 12 month cycle…plenty of time to flow. There just seemed to be a “no go” on the other days of the week. Most of our learning activities this week happened on Wednesday and then Saturday and Sunday. In these instances, I didn’t push and we didn’t move on to other areas. There were a few times this week that I presented the idea of tracing letters and either it just didn’t fly, or only what I asked was done (and that with little enthusiasm). I must pause and say, there is definitely a timing to this whole process. Mason’s inherent motivation – spell given words, make my own words, include new letters. Wow! My basic planning – have Mason spell his name and a few other words. Then he said a word, realized one of the letters wasn’t there, and wrote the letter with the chalk himself. Not only did he spell the words I thought up, he then started making words out of the letters on the ground. (Madison enjoyed jumping on letters as well!) I made sure to include the letters of his name so that there was a word with which I knew he was familiar. It came to me to write several letters on the ground and have Mason spell words by jumping on the letters in order. This makes it a great time to move into the realm of spelling basic word families and sight words. Out of interest, I asked if he could spell ‘and’ the other day. Mason’s inherent motivation – complete 5!Īnother time I noticed this blend of basic planning and inherent motivation: throughout the last couple of weeks, Mason has been more consistently sounding out words. Sitting down to work on letter tracing: my basic planning – complete two pages. In hopes to decrease the pile, we started working through these to use them up. We have several educational workbooks that have been given to us and have thus far been mostly out of sight, out of mind. I am seeing a beautiful blend of basic planning and inherent motivation budding forth.

My lesson this week: never underestimate.

Starfall calendar 2013