The Genial Hearth
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Archive for Reading
July 12, 2008 at 10:48 pm · Filed under Bilby, Domestic Life, Family, Home Education, Language, Paddington, Progress, Puggle, Reading, This Week
Week 1, Block 6, Dorothea Term
We continued our focus on routine and habits (I don’t know that the strategies I’m currently employing can best be described as successful:-( ).
We did get to Mat (couch!) Time most days, so we did a fair amount of reading and singing… Puggle is proving fond of The Skye Boat Song:-) Bilby is choosing to come and sit with us on the couch for a portion of the time, which is nice. Up until now she has pretty much either ignored us, or wanted to nurse. But she’s now bringing her own books to have read:-) (She loves nursery rhymes!)
I’ve also introduced the dipthongs/digraphs I had planned. I’m not anticipating that Puggle will memorise them and start applying them completely, this is mostly a first introduction. When we see the week’s examples around, I’m pointing them out—although, he has pointed some out on occasion, and has sometimes suggested words that might use them. I haven’t done much more than show them to him (and encourage him to trace them—I did make them sandpaper versions… may as well make use of that), and introduce the sounds, and find examples in our reading. Later in the week though, he was asking questions (while they were colouring in), so I drew some pictures, wrote the words and the sounds and got him to match them up. It’s really hard to find concrete nouns (that are within my drawing capacity!) for each sound off the top of my head:-( I think I need to start making a list (perhaps just each week in preparation) so that I’m not trying to do it on the fly:-)
All in all, a reasonably productive week. Especially given Paddington was away and we were all somewhat on edge:-(
June 28, 2008 at 4:57 pm · Filed under Books, For Adults, For Children, Language, Memes, Reading
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own blog.
1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (I have read most of the first, and I will get through the rest one day!)
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (Loved this:-) The whole series:-) )
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (Enjoyed this far more than The Mayor of Casterbridge—but that wouldn’t be at all hard!)
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare (I’ve read an awful lot of them, but I know there are more I need to get to. Some I love, others I like, and others didn’t really appeal to me.)
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (I chose it for bookclub, and I still haven’t finished it yet:-( )
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot (I was given this for Christmas years ago, and I haven’t gotten to it yet.)
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald (I can’t actually remember any details, but I do know I read it.)
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh (I keep coming across references to this, so it’s getting to the time I’ll get around to it.)
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden (Bookclub)
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (Bookclub)
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (I’m a big Anne fan:-) )
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood (I had already read it, and then we read it for Bookclub.)
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding (Read it in about year 10 and hated it with a passion.)
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel (We got it for Christmas a couple of years ago, but we’ve lent it to my father-in-law.)
52. Dune - Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (Bookclub. I hated it. The following year I taught a year 11 english class, and someone else had already set the booklist so I had to teach it. By the time I finished doing so, I was far more appreciative!)
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (Hmm… I’m pretty sure I have, although, once again, I can’t recall any details.)
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Really enjoyed most of them.)
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton (Haven’t read them in years, but I do have very fond memories.)
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (In French and English.)
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
February 14, 2008 at 9:42 pm · Filed under Domestic Life, Home Education, Language, Puggle, Reading, Writing
In my last ‘progress’ post, I commented that Puggle hadn’t been using anything from the sewing cabinet. Today, that changed (for no reason that I can see… I don’t think I’ve drawn any more attention to it… I had been thinking that maybe I should do some sewing, but I hadn’t said anything!) This morning, he systematically went through four different activities! He began with the Moveable Alphabet (and spent the most time on that).
He began by writing ‘hug’! I think he was just putting letters down and happened to get that combination (except he’s obviously remembered the ‘vowel in the middle’ bit that we talked about when he was using it last time). He asked me what it said, and I encouraged him to try saying it.
His next word was ‘wez’. This time, he began to sound it out without prompting. So he changed wez to ‘webz’. Then, he began working on spider… ’spidu’ which gave him ’spiduwebz’.
Then he kept playing, and ended up with ’spidukwebz’.
In speaking, he often seems to use ‘u’ for the ‘er’ sound—because ‘u is for for uncle’. It’s very australian to use ‘a’ or ‘u’ for ‘er’.
(He seems to have a surprisingly strong ocker accent… not quite sure where that comes from?!)
February 9, 2008 at 8:20 pm · Filed under Domestic Life, Home Education, Progress, Puggle, Reading, This Week
Week 4, Block 1, Boronia Term
It feels as though we’ve sat on the couch and read/sung quite frequently, but I think it’s mostly just been the TV cabinet stuff, as I think we only read one of the Aesop’s fables (whenever he brings the box of books over the fables book is almost always his first choice). He hasn’t done any of the sewing cabinet stuff (I think it needs clearing out a bit to make it more accessible).
He’s really paying a lot of attention to words. He was able to sound out and type ‘popcorn’ this week (although I had to tell him about the _r_), and was looking through the cake books and using the contents to look for page numbers, then reading the names of the cakes (based on the initial lettters). He was hampered a little bit because he doesn’t really know his numbers after 15 —and certainly doesn’t know which of any two numbers will be after the other (eg. will 72 be before 90).
January 20, 2008 at 8:00 pm · Filed under Art, Books, For Adults, For Children, French, Home Education, Language, Latin, Music, Picture Books, Plans, Puggle, Reading, Singing, This Week, Writing
Week 2, Block 1, Boronia Term
Language
Introduce phonograms ‘d’, ‘f’ (sandpaper letters and sand tray)
o mea Maria (Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary)
Amabo te (Please)
Frère Jacques
Viens! (Come)
English Studies
‘A Lost Paradise‘ from The Lilac Fairy Book Andrew Lang
‘Great Claus and Little Claus’ from The Complete Illustrated Stories Hans Christian Anderson
Narration: ‘The Frogs and the Ox‘, ‘The Dog, the Cock and the Fox‘, ‘Belling the Cat‘ from The Aesop for Children Ill. Milo Winter (He’s really a bit too young for Narration, so I’m mostly going to be keeping an ear out for re-tellings, or incorporation in play)
Recitation: Buckingham Palace A. A. Milne from When We Were Very Young
Art and Music
Folksong: The Drinking Gourd
Composer: Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov
Work: Scheherazade
Artist: Leonardo da Vinci
Work: Ginevra de’ Benci
Music: Loud/Soft (The Kodály Method 1 Lois Choksy) Hop Old Squirrel
Art: Watercolour
Painting a Wash (Art Ideas Fiona Watts)
January 14, 2008 at 7:30 am · Filed under Books, Domestic Life, French, Home Education, Language, Latin, Music, Organisation, Puggle, Reading, Singing, Writing
Puggle is waking up to this…
(filled with the books we’ll be reading, a writing/drawing pad, new scissors, new glue, a watercolour pad, brushes and dinosaur counters),
and this…
(sand tray/sandpaper letters, limited Metal Insets, Moveable Alphabet, World Map Puzzle, paper—and you can just see the Art book open at the left… I need to re-think the layout of the art/craft materials),
and this
… (the front of our TV cabinet… on the left door the Drinking Gourd, Ginevra de’ Benci [in black and white because I forgot to get it printed before hand] and Frère Jacques; on the right the French and Latin phrases, Corner of the Street, Bye, Baby Bunting, o mea Maria).
January 13, 2008 at 10:32 pm · Filed under Art, Books, Domestic Life, For Adults, For Children, French, Home Education, Language, Latin, Maths, Music, Narration, Organisation, Plans, Puggle, Reading, Singing, This Week, Writing
(I’ll update the sidebars very soon!)
Language
Introduce phonograms ‘a’, ‘c’ (sandpaper letters and sand tray)
o mea Maria (Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary)
Amabo te (Please)
Frère Jacques
Viens! (Come)
English Studies
‘The Fairy Nurse‘ from The Lilac Fairy Book Andrew Lang
‘The Tinder-Box’ from The Complete Illustrated Stories Hans Christian Anderson
Narration: ‘The Wolf and the Kid‘, ‘The Tortoise and the Ducks‘ ‘The Young Crab and His Mother‘ from The Aesop for Children Ill. Milo Winter (at this stage I’m not going to focus particularly on narration:-) )
Recitation: Corner of the Street A. A. Milne from When We Were Very Young
Art and Music
Folksong: The Drinking Gourd
Composer: Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov
Work: Scheherazade
Artist: Leonardo da Vinci
Work: Ginevra de’ Benci
Music: Loud/Soft (The Kodály Method 1) Bye, Baby Bunting
Art: Watercolour
Brushwork and Watercolour paints(Art Ideas)
January 8, 2008 at 8:00 pm · Filed under Art, Books, Domestic Life, Family, Food, For Adults, For Children, For the Future, French, History, Home Education, Language, Latin, Maths, Montessori, Music, Narration, Nature Study, Organisation, Plans, Puggle, Reading, Science, Singing, Writing
General stuff:-)
As I was happy with the structure of our year in 2007, we’ll stick with the same thing in 2008. I have made a decision about the term names. This year we’ll have Boronia, Dorothea and Edith terms. They’re two great-grandmothers and one great-great-grandmother, covering three of the four branches of our family tree. We’ll start the week beginning January 13th. I have plans for a Cornucopia (as I believe they do in Germany at the start of the school year) containing coloured pencils, some new glue and scissors, more sticky tape, counters, and any other bits of stationery type things I think of to include.
Language (Including Memorisation and Copywork)
I have definite plans in this area, but I’m hoping to be able to keep a grip on myself! I’m planning to begin using Writing Road to Reading
this year. I’m not necessarily thinking that we’ll use it as written, but I thought I would use their order to work through the phonograms, and aim to introduce them all this year… but mostly it will act as a resource for me—so I can look things up if I don’t know why phonograms make their sound (there were a surprising number I didn’t know when I read it a year or so ago!) As Puggle reaches the appropriate stages, I’m planning to be ready with I Spy, Moveable Alphabet, Object Boxes, Action Cards, and Reading Folders—the first two should be fairly immediate, the others I’ll work on making, so they’ll be ready when he is up to them. (I’m not going to link to all of the specific materials… I have posts planned when they’re made, or if you’re desperate to know (!) ask me in the comments:-) )
Otherwise, we’ll continue with Latin Nursery Rhymes (I have enough for two per Block!) and I’m going to add in some everyday Latin phrases (look, careful, listen, sit up etc.). We’ll start doing the same for French, so a nursery rhyme per fortnight, and everyday French phrases (I still need to sort out which comptines we’ll use).
For Memorisation, we’ll be using When We Were Very Young
, by A. A. Milne. We’ll basically read and repeat a poem a week, and I’d like to pick one of the four (actually, I think it’s five per Block) to work on memorising. There are sufficient short ones that it should be possible from the start of the year.
We’ll begin Copywork properly this year. I’ll re-introduce the sandpaper letters when we do that phonogram, and I’ll also provide a Sand Tray for practice (still need to finish that). I also need to complete our ‘Metal’ Insets, which he can practice with. For these, he’ll use the ‘Lyra’ coloured pencils which are thick, triangular ones. Hopefully this will assist Puggle’s proper writing grip.
Maths
I’m basically intending a fairly Montessori style approach. I have a number of started Sensorial materials, (Pink Tower, Broad Stair, Square of Pythagoras), some completed (Red Rods, Geometric Solids—a Christmas gift, but still, ready to use), and plans to make some others Geometric Cabinet, Constructive Triangles, Binomial Cube, Trinomial Cube and Geometric Cards. I am similarly in progress with Maths materials, some complete (Number Rods, Sandpaper Numbers, Number Tablets and Number Cards), some almost complete (Spindle Box), and plans to make some of the rest.
My plan is to prepare the materials, present them as he seems ready, but just leave him to work with them as he sees fit. Obviously well also be talking about numbers as a normal part of our day (cooking, measuring and various number related books we read).
I also figured that my resolution to play more games can’t but help with maths:-)
English Studies
We’ll be reading all year from The Aesop for Children
illustrated by Milo Winter. These are quite brief re-tellings, and this is the main place I’ll be working on developing Narration. I am hoping that we’ve both kind of got a grasp on it by the end of the year:-)
We’ll also be reading a selection of stories over the year from The Lilac Fairy Book
, The Pink Fairy Book
, The Violet Fairy Book
and The Olive Fairy Book by Andrew Lang. As a family read-aloud (so, not necessarily in Mat Time, and quite possibly starting to be some before bed reading—depending on the story!) we’ll be reading selections from Complete Illustrated Stories
by Hans Christian Anderson for the first part of the year, and all of Winnie-the-Pooh
by A. A. Milne for the last term (Edith Term:-) ) Essentially that will break down to three fables, one Fairy Book story, and one Family Read-Aloud selection a week—which I think should be do-able. I may in fact not do all the fables, but rather choose between them at the time. Certainly I doubt that we’ll be narrating more than one!
Health and Phys. Ed
We’re continuing with our weekly swimming lessons. I thought I might try introducing some yoga (through cards that he can do himself, once I’ve shown them to him). We’re working on making the ‘back’yard more contained, and we’re digging a hole for the trampoline. When he’s out there he rarely stops moving:-) I would also like to work (again!) on establishing regular Nature Walks.
(At his age I’m not seriously planning things here… But in the future I’ll need to consider this Learning Area, so I’m noting it now.)
History and Geography
We’re basically going to stick with geography for now. Puggle is really aware of maps, so we’ll make use of the Picture Atlas we have, and he got a pretty good world map puzzle for Christmas. I have plans to make a few more, plus some land and water forms (more of those Montessori materials!) We also plan to acquire a globe.
Science
I intend (once again!) to work on including a weekly Nature walk. I’m not going to worry too much about it until the weather gets more pleasant (so, not until at least March), as I figure it’s one thing to maintain a habit when the weather drops off… but it’s much harder to establish it. We will do some more gardening. We’ll also begin observing the weather.
Aside from these, I’ve been working on various ‘Parts of Animal’ cards, and I’ll finish those, and I have plans for some of the Botany Cabinet stuff.
Art and Music
After my library find earlier this year, I was really excited to discover a copy of The Usborne Complete Book of Art Ideas
(a single edition version of the book I’d found, plus its companion volumes) by Fiona Watts in a local shop just before Christmas. It became a family present:-) I’m planning to use this for the practical side of our art curriculum—for some years:-) I’ve decided to stick to a theme per term (at this stage, media), so I’ve pulled all the watercolour and wax crayon/oil pastel ideas out. My plan is to prepare the materials for the activity, and leave that with the book (open to the page) on the sewing cabinet. Hopefully Puggle will have the opportunity to attack the idea multiple times if he chooses. (They’re not really independent things, but it is about the process… and I’m happy to assist or inform when he wants… we’ll see how that goes.)
We’ll continue following the Ambleside Online Artist study schedule, so that means this year will be Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt van Rijn and Jan van Eyck.
When I was at my last school, I was good friends with the music teacher. She was a real Kodály afficienado. She lent me The Kodály Method I: Comprehensive Music Education
by Lois Choksy which I read with great interest. (I can’t follow it all yet, but I find it very inspiring.) I’ve since got my own copy so I can read and mull (and work on!), and that’s where my practical music programme is coming from—I was already planning on singing:-) We’ll continue with our Ambleside based Folksong plan, but I’ll be sure to include a range of nursery rhymes as suggested, and make sure that we talk about and experiment with the ten aspects of music that are introduced in the Preschool year plan.
We’re also following the Ambleside Composer study schedule, so Boronia Term we’ll listen to Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Aelexander Borodin and Modest Mussorgsky. Dorothea Term will be George Frederic Handel, and Edith Term we’ll listen to works by Camille Saint-Saens and Hector Berlioz.
Technology and Enterprise
(This is probably my least consisdered area… bizarre given that it’s what I taught! I guess there are a couple of reasons for that. I just don’t think as an eary it’s as important as some of the others, but equally, I’m fairly confident of my ability to wing it for a while… no need to plan at all at this stage. I do have an idea of developing a woodwork curriculum for junior primary homeschooled kids… when we reach that stage, so a little way ahead of me for now:-) )
He got a toolbox for Christmas… so we’ll start some woodwork:-) And of course, more cooking:-)
(I could never be an unschooler! But maybe I should re-read my The Latin-Centered Curriculum
… this seems as though it may be a little over the top…)
In the next week before we start, I have quite a bit of sorting still to do:-( Arranging equipment/books so that they’re accessible and making sure that we have all the bits (music, still need Borodin’s Polovtsian Dances, and the French comptines are proving challenging:-( ) we need. I also have a long list of materials I plan to make (or finish) in the first half of this year… I’m going to be quite busy:-)
November 20, 2007 at 11:48 pm · Filed under Home Education, Language, Puggle, Reading, Writing
I wanted to make sure I noted what I actually did with Puggle and the alphabet this year, as it’s not quite as I’d planned.
We did use a very laid-back approach. I had planned on a week per letter, with two weeks for the vowels. We did keep this pace. I chose to stick to just lower case letters as these are the most commonly found. I had intended to tie the craft activity to the letter—that only lasted about a month! I also planned to draw attention to that letter throughout the week.
Each week, I printed out a couple of pages of the weeks letter in outline. I had planned on using one of these (A5) sheets for the craft, and then the rest were for Puggle to draw on (A5 because at the start of the year he was basically only drawing a single line on any page… and I didn’t want a whole pile of full sheets with just one line:-) ). He has other paper as well, but I thought that if some of his pages had the letter in the background it would help him become familiar with the letters. I had thought that he’d just draw over it, but instead he would only trace the letter. As a result, I figured that I should probably show him how they were meant to be drawn so that he wouldn’t get into any bad habits.
In the end, I have been printing out one A4 page with two copies of the letter on it, and three or four A4 pages with four copies of the letter (see each week in the plans catagory for the letters). I had still intended on doing the craft, so that was one of the large copies. With the second, Puggle and I would chat about what words we knew that started with the letter, and I would draw them (well, the easy-to-draw concrete nouns… I can’t draw!) I would use one of the little pages to demonstrate how to write the letter, colouring in a bit at the bottom of the page to show which way around the letter goes, and putting a green and red dot to show where to begin and end writing the letter.
Last week we finished the alphabet. This week he is typing his own YouTube search terms (when we spell them for him! Although for some simple words he can sound out at least the beginning of them if prompted…) He seems to mostly be able to handle both sound and letter name, although I try to be reasonably consistent with just the sound. He doesn’t really write the letters, aside from tracing them on the pages (and aside from his own initials:-) ). But I wasn’t intending for writing to be a focus at the moment. He certainly does recognise all the lowercase letters, and most of the uppercase letters. Probably he would have done even if I hadn’t done anything particularly—it’s been this year that he’s started paying attention to various alphabet books.
October 23, 2007 at 8:21 pm · Filed under For the Future, Language, Organisation, Reading
Willa recently posted about her reading plans for one of her young sons. I’m particularly interested because she is taking a literature approach, which appeals to me.
She is using the Primary Reading and Literature and its accompanying Primer. She also includes links to Don Potter’s phonics site.
I am pretty set on Writing Road to Reading as our reading spine (for my phonics knowledge at the very least), but I’m starting to think about the actual ‘presentation’ of the information. Anything too formal seems somewhat over-done for home, but I’m not certain what it will look like. This post gives me some pointers.
(A little further down the track… Kathy has an interesting [and helpful] post on planning a reading programme—including pointers on numbers of pages and how to calculate how much to assign over a year.)
May 23, 2007 at 11:47 pm · Filed under Language, Puggle, Reading, Writing
Puggle is really paying attention to what he is saying, and regularly asks what starts with a given sound, or what sound is at the start of a word.
We’re also spending some time paying attention to how we form sounds. Since I’ve been printing the alphabet letters for him to draw on, he’s started asking what words start with that sound, or what sound does a given word begin with. And he’s been offering suggestions. Some of which are very accurate, but others remind me that he doesn’t have a complete grasp on all sounds (although, they are age appropriate still), ‘W’ for Wooster (rooster, I know ‘r’ is one of the later sounds—and in fact, he does occasionally say it correctly) and ‘P’ for bus.
March 2, 2007 at 12:32 am · Filed under For the Future, Home Education, Language, Maths, Montessori, Reading
Maths games done the Montessori way.
And here’s a free learning to read site.
October 4, 2006 at 12:41 am · Filed under For the Future, Home Education, Language, Reading
Start quoting him now.
Brush up your Shakespeare
And the women you will wow!
In the last couple of days I’ve seen a number of people blogging about the Bard, and introducing him to children. I figured I’d collect the posts together for my own later references:-)
First of all there’s M-mv, then there’s the Headmistress.
And Kathy Jo has a whole swag of posts, here, here, here, and here.
October 2, 2006 at 3:06 pm · Filed under For the Future, Home Education, Language, Montessori, Montessori Monday, Reading, Writing
They’re finished!
I did end up trimming all the boards. They are all now 100 mm wide, with the short letter boards being 98 mm high, and the tall letter boards being 130 mm high.
I ruled lines across the boards for the letters to ’sit’ on (to help orientation, and also to model correct positioning). On the short letters and the tall letters that extend upwards, this line is 25 mm from the bottom. On the tall letters that extend downwards it is 58 mm from the bottom.
I traced the templates onto the ’sandpaper’ (remembering to reverse them, so that the textured side ends up on top!) and then cut them out.
I have positioned the letters on the line and central. I decided to do this so that they will suit both right and left handed users.
I did the gluing in batches of about eight to ten cards. I would lay each card out, select the letter and check its position (so that I considered its slope for example). Then I turned the letter over and used PVA glue to dot along the back. I spread it carefully over the whole back of the letter, making sure that it wasn’t too thick. I then placed the letter on the card as accurately as possible and patted it down with a tissue to collect any excess glue.
I finished by turning the letter over onto the table, and weighting it down with a large book to ensure that the card and letter didn’t curl away from each other. After they were allowed some time to dry (about 15 minutes I think, the glue wasn’t very thick) I collected them up and allowed them to stand between books on the shelf.
Now to make/find a suitable box to put them in:-)
ETA a link to Shu-Chen Jenny Yen’s Presentation information for Sandpaper Letters.
May 2, 2006 at 3:59 pm · Filed under For the Future, Home Education, Language, Reading, Writing
Nursery Rhyme copywork copywork for teaching punctuation and Grammar.
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by A. A. Milne
by Andrew Lang
