"Saturday School"

This week has been a messy one. There was no Monday class day and Thursdays was used up for Speech so we did days three and four together and now day five which typically would be done on a Friday is being done today, on a Saturday. Tomorrow we'll go to church and have "Sunday school" but first we have to finish up our Letter of the Week by Confessions of a Homeschooler, Letter 'A' and have "Saturday school"!

After starting our day off like every other, weather, months of the year, days of the week, devotion, prayer etc... We dove right into the curriculum with some practice pre-writing. 

There was four sheets if you counted the upper and lowercase 'B' page.

I held and guided Vada's hand over the doted lines to make the correct shapes and lines. This was Vada's first real experience (that I can think of) at structured pre-handwriting. She has colored and mimicked some of what I have drawn but rarely have I took her hand in mine to make her draw something and never have I made her trace something while I was holding her hand. She was pretty tolerant of me helping her.

After we did all of the pages together, I let Vada have independent writing time. She scribbled wrote all over the sheets and you could tell that she was quite proud of herself for doing so!

I realized after doing this activity with Vada that I should have placed her left hand on the sheet of paper she was writing on when we were practicing on writing. She often puts her hand on the page when it's just her but not all of the time and it is something that she needs to learn to do all of the time for writing. So I will have to remember to do that step next week when we are doing the pre-handwriting activity.

We worked on upper and lowercase recognition with this 'A' is for Apple, Apple Tree work sheet.

I can't honestly say if Vada took in anything from this or not. We watch Leap Frog videos here and they have one that is called The Amazing Alphabet and there is a song that goes "Big G. Little g. Big E. Little E" and so on, for the entire alphabet. So, instead of saying uppercase and lowercase all of the time I sang Leap Frogs "Big and Little" song. I believe that by connecting the two together it'll help V better understand the meaning of the letters.

We worked on size sorting. 

 And then for more math fun we moved onto Ants on a Log ('A' is for Ants). 

For this activity we just counted the ants on each "log" and said the colors that each on was. For counting activities I always ask Vada to use her pointer. I held her fingers into a fist for her so that she could hold her pointer in a pointing position. Her thumb splints were both drying otherwise they would have helped her feel the correct position that her hands should have been in.

Each "log" has a reverse side, ants on one side and a leaf with a matching numeral.

We went through ten "logs".

And then Vada helped me put them away. It was kind of like putting a puzzle together.

All week Vada has been begging (by signing) for popcorn! She has seen this game sitting on the shelf and no matter how many times that I have shown her that it is not real popcorn, she continues to ask for it. So today I got out the popcorn, "Pop for Letters".

She was thrilled!

She was in heaven!

And she actually wanted to play!

There is actually a game to this, with rule and everything but I just let Vada grab letters and then I would take one from her handful, drop the remaining amount into the box and then read the letter out loud. I would then follow up by singing the Leap Frog Letter Song " The A says ahh. The A says ahh. Every letter makes a sound. The A says ahhh."

In the two pictures below, Vada is signing popcorn.

We also played with some more food-like learning toys, Trail Mix & Match. 

We tried to do some lacing.

And then it got pretty heavy!

It was getting pretty late in the day and since it was Saturday and everyone was home we decided to call it a day and go hang out! However, I thought that for another time, it would be fun to do patterns with these. Maybe take some pictures and have Vada try to copy the pictures? Were going to make our own trail mix as well. I really like trail mix! Yum!