Now that summer is here and S is home more, I am in the process of getting more organized with home learning activities. S's baby brother, M (Has he even been mentioned here yet? Poor second born!) is now 8 months old and so I have been wanting to include him in our activities. A great way to teach multi-age kids is to use
themes.
While I have always used themes to organize our activities in the past and probably will return to them when school begins, I decided to try something different during the summer because I felt like it might be a good fit for both boys at this point. We are going to have a "focus word" each week.
This week's word is DOG. M is playing with dog toys (ones meant for children, not dogs), is seeing lots of photographs and illustrations of dogs from books, and is learning the
sign for dog.
S on the other hand has shown lots of interest in reading lately ("How do you spell ______?" "What does __-__-__ spell?"). Since he loves identifying initial letter sounds and is so interested in learning how to read, I am going with it even though he's still very young. This could be a passing phase and my plan is abandoned mid-summer, but so far it's working well and S is loving "learning to read."
Since our focus word is dog, we have been doing activities using the -og word family:
made an -og flip book
spelled -og words using
Pringles lids, magnet letters, tub letters, letter tiles, linking cubes, etc...
We have also been reading lots of books about dogs and frogs and finding the word dog and frog in them:
Other focus words I plan to use this summer (though they may change) are fan, hat, dad, pig, hot, bug, nap, and car. I chose these because they are good baby signs and also lend themselves to CVC word family words. I also like
this site for word family printable books and
this site for nursery rhymes, but didn't use them this week as there is no -og.
We also used our old dog carrier to set up a vet center for S (and M) to pretend with. I also plan to do some math activities later in the week using little dog counters, and still need to come up with a dog craft.
