August Day 13 - Alphabet Robot

What do you want a robot to do for you? Was the question that started our day.  Lachlan said he would like a robot that got him blue juice, which is what he calls apple juice.  He has called it that since he first started talking.  We are working on the correct term, slowly.

Next we put together our little bilingual book.  One has come in every months box.  All on one full size piece of paper they have printed out 4 little pages with both Spanish and English words printed on them.  Each page is numbered and black and white for coloring.  This months book is titled What Can I Make? I sat them down on the floor and had them color the pages first.  Then I popped them out and worked with each child to put them in order.  I asked them to find the number 1 first.  Peter found it then I asked for number 2, he wasn't sure so I showed him after letting his eyes search the numbers for a little while.  Lachlan was able to get them all.  Once we got them in order we stapled the spine.  Then we read through the story.

Moving on to Letter Drop.  This was super cute.  I wrote an uppercase and lowercase letter A through D on the yellow paper which was provided in the day bag today.  Upon further reading, this yellow paper was meant to be a cover for our bilingual books.  Oops.  Anyhow, I dropped the letter on the ground and pretended to be a robot picking it up with bent elbows swinging back and forth freezing at certain points to look like a robot.  As I was bending down I said /a/a/a/ A when I reached the letter.  Oh man were the boys hooked at this point!  My turn, my turn! As they jumped up and down.  Okay, okay children now lets not try to learn all at once.  Stop fighting over who gets to learn something new first.  This was of course internal monologue.  But isn't it great that the things Mother Goose Time comes up with are so fun, they have no clue they are learning? Yes!  Just in case you needed me to answer that question for you.  So I threw down B for Peter.  He looked at me out of the corner of his eye with a little twinkle, excited to get started but not sure of the sound to make.  I said that is B so he started saying B, B.  I said first make the B sound /b/b/b/.  He did so beautifully and exclaimed B as he reached the letter.  Lucy got D and Lachlan got C and they both did awesome.

 Peter's robot moves

 So proud of his letter B

Lachlan's somewhat unorthodox robot picking up method.

So we moved on to a Lowercase Letters exercise.  I got out their journals and found a blank page.  I gave them each a pen and Lachlan a fine point permanent marker.  I told them to first draw a robot.  Again, robots are one of Lachlan's favorite so he was pumped to draw a robot.  He was drawing a Zachbot which is from the show Wild Kratt's that he loves oh so much.  Then we were to write the word robot on a large piece of paper in lowercase letters.  I chose to write it on a dry erase writing board that my wonderful sister in law picked up for me.  I keep wanting Lachlan to try writing with out just tracing and since the journal pages have the writing lines on them I thought if he could see the word robot also written between the writing lines it could help.  So he got started and really didn't seem to notice the lines.  I tried to point them out and show them how they work but he pretty quickly got mad and tried to shut me down.  I am not sure why he thinks he needs to learn to write all on his own with out instruction, but he does.  I calmed him down and said, please, just let me show you something.  I showed him the two solid lines with the dashed line in between.  I showed him how the straight line on the letter r started at the dashed line and then went down to the solid line.  How the curve of the r came to just under the dashed line.  I showed him the o was made between the dashed and solid and the b's straight line went from solid line to solid line.  He watched as we worked through each letter and did his best to match it.  He mostly put the letters between the top solid line and the dashed line, but he was getting the idea and listening.  So I consider it a very big positive.  His robot, by, the way, turned out amazing.

Lachlan then turned the page and started drawing something else of his own.  He drew a beach and some sea shells.  He made a little line for himself and then started making more lines for each person he wanted there with him at the beach looking for sea shells.  He listed most of his family and cousins before he ran out of room on the page.  So sweet.

Lachlan's beach scene.

The last two activities we didn't fit into our day, but we finished this morning.  For the Letter Robot Match I hid the lowercase letters A through D and hid them around the room.  Then I gave Lachlan the uppercase letter and told him to find the lowercase one.  Peter joined in as well, when there was one letter left.  He found it!

I told Lachlan to look for the letters and I had one in my hand while I was holding the camera.  He thought he had found one. 

Where could it be?  Can you see the yellow on the table.

Found it!

Lastly we read the book of the month.  This month we got a book called Doctor Maisy.  MGT had us make three columns on a piece of paper.  Again, I used the back side of the dry erase writing board.  At the top of the column put a period, question mark and exclamation mark.  As we read through the story we were supposed to keep tally of the different punctuations.  I would have never thought of this.  But what a fun way to get them to notice these things.  All three children loved looking for and counting them.  I couldn't take pictures, read a book and tally punctuations so I just took a picture of our finished count.