A Dino-Mite Day

Today we finished our patriotic theme, this was actually our Fourth of July packets and worksheets. We began with a matching sheet from Overthebigmoon.com. Vada shocked me with her matching skills, I just hadn't realized she could do this yet but she showed me!

I have fallen behind on posting our days activities (go figure!) but I did record Vada doing this matching activity and posted it the day of, you can click here and here to watch both video's, if you haven't already seen them.

We then did some puzzles. These are difficult for Vada to do but with more practice she will get the hand of it again. These past couple of weeks and through the last couple of letters we haven't been sticking to the "LOTW" curriculum entirely, since we have just been doing a refreshing course through them. Next week we will begin new letters and we will be doing most of the activities in each binder for each letter.

Vada's doing our sign for firework, I don't know what the ASL sign is and haven't looked it up. We made up our own sign.

We did some early reading/literacy activities with these three part cards.

Right now, I think that it is more Vada listening to directions and looking at the cards and actually noticing what is on the cards. Eventually, with more practice she will see that the letters all combine and match.

When I told Vada that we were "all done", she was so happy! She loves to be read to and she loves books but these activities, the harder ones, well they're hard and it takes a lot from her.

Not only were we done with the literacy activity we were completely finished with all of the activities that I had planned for that set so we moved on to some LOTW activities. 

"Catch" begins with the letter 'C', so we decided to have some fun catching fish!

This is a very good attention and control game. It is also quite difficult to catch those little boogers! I caught ten and Vada alone could not get any bites but she didn't get discouraged! After trying for a very long time we decided to move onto another activity but not until we picked up our mess here. Together we counted the fish that were caught and then Vada put them back into their little slots. 

"Cookies" begin with the letter 'C' and so we "counted" the "Chocolate Chips" on the "cookies" for a fun math lesson.

Vada liked to pretend to eat each and every cookie. 

Once we had counted all of the chips on the cookies I pushed them all into a pile in front of Vada and asked her to flip them over so that we could see the numbers on the back side and then I put them in order, in front of her.

We counted them one time all of the way through and then counted them as Vada took them one by one and put them back into the cookie jar.

We also played with the ABC Cookies. For this activity we kept it simple and just did letter recognition and singing for each letter.

"Colors" also begins with the letter 'C' and so we played with this fun Elmo toy that teaches red, orange, yellow, green and blue and then numbers one through five. "Elmo" asks you to find the colors, or the numbers and then you have to push the correct buttons. "Elmo" will also ask you to count the crayons that are lit up and to then push the number, so counting is required. It is fun and simple but it challenges Vada to listen and to work on her color recognition as well as her counting and number knowledge. 

We worked on letter 'C' all week, longer than any of the other letters that we were going back over. I really wanted to hear Vada make that 'C' sound but as much as she made sounds when asked "What does the 'C' say?", she wasn't quite getting the correct sound out. Last Fall she had this sound, so I know it is possible and I know that it'll come again so I decided to move on to our last letter that we needed to go back over before beginning new ones. I'm excited to move on to some new letters.

Our next letter was letter 'D'. 'D' is for dinosaur.

We began with some very simple handwriting practice on the upper and lowercase letter 'D's.

Followed by some pom pom magnet 'D' is for dinosaur page.

And then Vada "WOWed" me with her skills during this uppercase and lowercase letter matching activity. She was amazing! I mentioned earlier that I have fallen behind on posting but I happen to have recorded Vada during these activities and I shared them the day of. If you haven't already watched the videos you can do so here with the lowercase video and here with the uppercase video.

Last Fall when we were working on letter 'D' we did all kinds of fun things! We dug for dinosaur bones, had fossil cookies and even made our own dinosaur fossil. I set the fossil aside to dry and it was forgotten. Today I brought it back out and let Vada paint it.