Simple Learning

I was just text talking with my wonderful sister in law Amy.  She had seen the Top of the Tower post about highlighting letters in a magazine and tried it with her son Gage, see Gage here.  He is 4 months older than Lachlan.  Gage loved it and kept at it for 30 minutes!  Wow. That is focus.  This makes me so happy to hear.

Look how well he holds that highlighter.  A few weeks ago she sent a picture of Gage holding a writing board with names of different family members he had written.  He really is a smart kid!

So we were talking further about simple ideas of activities you can do with things you have around your house.  It made me think of a few other ideas I have never talked about and don't have pictures of but you still might find them useful.

One is to hide a handful of similar items around the house.  Like a collection of stuffed animals or action figure men or quarters (boy that would motivate them) or anything else really.  Then you explain to your child where you have hidden them by using in, on, behind, on top, under, over etc.  Just a simple activity to build their understanding of these words and their meanings.

One we just did today was to replace the first letter of each persons name with the letter of the week, which this week is L.  So nothing different for Lachlan, but Lracy for my name was pretty funny to him.  Oh so my name isn't Lracy?  No, it's Tracy he would say.  That's silly.

Lastly, pull out a tray and collect items around your house that start with a certain letter and one or two that don't start with that letter.  FunShine had us take J's on a journey.  So we got out our little suitcase and starting sorting through the items listening for the /j/ sound and putting those items in the suitcase.  I love that /j/ and journey go together, but I have to say, /j/ items were really hard to find around the house.  Really you could do this with any letter sound.

There is a game that also came with FunShine that has a picture of a person and little cards with different items on them.  We are learning about the 5 senses.  The game consists of picking a card and choosing what sense you would use with this item.  Like a picture of an apple would be placed by the persons mouth, a picture of a flower by the persons nose.  But you could do a similar activity with things around your house placed on a tray.  Then you could just verbally talk about which sense goes with each item or hand draw a picture of a person to put the items on.  

Now that I am typing I am thinking of more but I don't want to overwhelm you all in one post. 

If you find my blog posts helpful and you decide to make a purchase at FunShine Express please select my blog name in the referral section when you check out. We are so thankful for any help we get towards the expense of our boys education.