Starting Language activities with Trevor :)

Trevor is 2.5 yrs now. I decided that since he is not going to school yet, I better start teaching him at home. So here's us learning phonic sounds at home. I am doing an adapted, integrated Montessori phonics way & got ideas from a website call totallytots. Blogspot.com- great website where a couple of home school mummies share what they do at home. Great great ideas;).

Sensorial Impressions of the shape of the letters before learning to hold a pencil and writing.
Ok so I started Trevor with tracing on 'a' cut out from felt- Montessori way is to use sensorial impression for the 2-3 yr olds. Actual Montessori material would be the sandpaper letters buy I just adapted a little. Still using the same concept I used other materials instead. Haven't got time to get the sandpapers and cut them into letters of the alphabets yet. So here is our little creation;)




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Ants on the apple 'a','a','a'!- we did a letter craft with felt and cut a real apple and did printings with it.Result- an apple tree."

Big Brush Painting:
Started a scrap book on phonic sounds " We did big brush writing where i printed a big 'a' using wordart in words font size about size250. This is a pre-writing exercise where Trevor used different crayons and colour pencil and paint brush to trace and practice writing the formation of the letter 'a'. I must say he is pretty good at it. Didn't need much of my help at all. The sensorial impression did work;)

Pegging:
After painting it, I get Trevor to run outside and peg the paper on the line(practical life integrated- pegging uses 1st 3 fingers of the hand- the pincer grip which is essential for preparation for writing.

Writing on our sand pit.
Then we traced 'a' in our little sand pit. Where I bought some fine sand from a nursery and put it in a container. I showed Trevor how to write the letters on the sand with his hands and I got Trevor to 'erase' it with his favourite digger and he writes again.

Intergrate Cultural: Science & Mathematics
After that we took out and dried the apple seeds from the apple that we uses for printing and did counting with them.

We ended the activity with some apples for snack. ;)


We did the same for the other phonic sounds:
For 'b' we did a craft tracing the bowl and using different balls to print and make patterns.
"Using crayons- "balls are bouncing b b b""

Currently we are on schedule- one phonic sound a week. And another we do is mystery bag. I collected items whig begins with the sound for example, for 'b' we have ball, barrel, boat, bear, banana, bell, bag...

Mystery Bag
"Learning vocabulary of sounds beginning with b"
I place all the items into a drawstring bag and we take turns putting our hands in to feel and touh an object saying "I spy with my little eye, a ...." we try to guess it before pulling it out. ( integrating sensorial exercise- stereonogstic bag) Language is all about talking, communicating and relating to the environment and the experiences of a child. After pulling the object we talk about it , where have we seen this before, what does it do, sing songs relates to it. We then place the items from left to right-encouraging left to right concept, preparing the eyes for reading left to right and the hands to write from left to right.

Sound like a lot?I try to keep it simple and it's just a half hour daily activity and we repeat the
mystery bag exercise and tracing the letter as revision for the other days of the week. moat importantly is we have fun learning;)

Check out the photographs that I have taken and if you are a parent try it yourself. Learning should not only be in school by it should begin at home as early as possible :) Have fun!