Froglet school week 2: A

Literacy:
This week we revised letter X with some writing, and learnt letter A using the Starfall sheets and website. Although the writing exercise lets you do capital and lower-case letters, we're mostly focusing on lower-case.

Maths:
Froglet got two new pages of raisin maths adding up to 8 and 9. I like to mix the results because otherwise I think he would quickly work out that the answer is always 8 (or whatever it is). When he's putting the raisins in the boxes, he always arranges them neatly: the first four in the four corners, then number 5 in the middle, number 6 at the top, number seven at the bottom and eight and nine on the left and right. Not sure what he'll do when we get to ten!

Telling the time:
We worked on recognising that it's "something o'clock". I discovered that although he can count up to 15 quite nicely, he actually doesn't recognise numbers beyond 9 at all, and is rather hazy on 6, 8 and 9. (7 is fine). So that's something else to work on.

Froglet school week 1 - letter X

Like the blog title says, I'm not really homeschooling... but I do want Froglet to learn to read in English before he starts school in German next year. I've been teaching him sort of vaguely for about a year now, and he knows all the letters but just doesn't do much in the way of stringing them together. So now we are starting to work at it properly, every day.

Last week we concentrated on X, which is Froglet's initial. He played the x game on Starfall, as well as quite a few of the other letters for fun, and we read two phonics books that include x: The Red Hen and It (Floppy phonics). Then we printed out the x exercise sheet from Starfall and he learnt to write X. Last time I tried doing one of these sheets (a) he wasn't very interested but i think now he's four he must be just the right age because he did it quickly and happily and then we played noughts and crosses together. He even helped me draw the noughts-and-crosses board!
We also watched the "when two vowels go walking" song from Starfall and the longer version from Between The Lions, as we're reviewing EE this week too, and did the ee game on the starfall website.

We read the story of how Jesus washed the disciples' feet, and learnt the verse that says "I have set an example for you, so that you will do just what I have done for you." I'm trying to do a verse and story for each letter. Here the relevant word is example. Then we talked about how we can/do serve others. (After this Froglet went down to the basement all by himself and got the washing out of the machine for me!)

We also did some raisin/smartie/peanut maths. We have these in a transparent folder so he can put the smarties straight on the page and I can just wipe it clean afterwards. So far I've only done pages that add up to 7 - next week we'll add up to 8.

And finally, something I've never done with him before either, patterns. He wasn't so excited about this but he enjoyed playing with his peg board for a while after he had copied a couple of the patterns and then tipped everything out again.

Halloween

I have been seeing so much about pumpkins, dressing up, crafts and other items relating to Halloween recently. Some really cool ideas, others that gross me out - eeew spiders! And although I am a big fan of Harry Potter, I'm not actually so keen on Halloween, especially trick-or-treating. Fortunately we don't have to do anything much because this holiday isn't a big deal in Switzerland. We have our main dressing-up-as-monsters event at the start of Lent instead. It's basically Halloween for a whole week, minus the pumpkins.

But I wanted to join in the fun anyway by linking to this great post by Christine Sine at Godspace, called Getting Ready for Halloween. Whether you believe in celebrating Halloween or really don't like it at all, she has some interesting thoughts. Here's a quote to spark your interest:

Today there seems to be more talk about not celebrating Halloween because it has been so taken over by witches, covens and non Christian groups. But is that the right attitude? How could we redeem the celebration of Halloween and return it to the Christian celebration it once was? How can we enter into the joy and celebration of God’s rhythm of feasting and add to the fun rather than trying to kill it?

I may have more thoughts on this later but I have a German lesson to go to and homeschooling to plan. Where do all you homeschooling mothers find time to blog?!

Things I want to do/make by myself!

Pinwheel bobby pins - I think these would be a cool gift for my little niece.
Danish* heart baskets for Christmas decorations. We used to make these with paper as kids, now I'd like to try with felt.
Finish my knitted blanket for the kids when in the car. It's only taken me a year so far...

That's all for now but I shall add to this list as time goes on, and put a link up in the sidebar like the joint crafts one.

*Random facts about me: I lived in Denmark as a baby, when we would divide our time between Germany and Copenhagen with my dad's job. I then studied Danish at university and lived in Copenhagen on my own for a year. Would love to go back. And the bulk of my translation work is now from Danish to English.