What we've been up to!

O.k.!!! I had mentioned that we were going to work on the color Gray. This was one of the worksheets that allowed Creston to see the color gray and to pick out the pictures of things that were gray.

He glued the 2 things that were NOT gray onto the back of the worksheet.

This is the "Letter A" folder that I have all of the activities for him that deal with the Letter "A". He really seems to be getting A! Hopefully he'll take to the rest of the letters this way! I have no complaints so far!

Here are all of the activities that are in his "A" folder. I'll keep everything and then have most of it for when I start to teach Mackie!

I've been having Creston work on the spelling of his name. I created these word documents that have his name on them....I changed the color of the ink to a light gray so that he could still see the letters, but still color over them to draw his name himself!
This has worked rather well so far! I printed off SEVERAL of these pages and will have him do a couple each day until he can spell his name and recognize it and each of the letters!

Today, after he attempted his name several times, he got brave and tried to write it himself in-between each word! He was alllll about making his letters BIG! We've also been working with him on the direction to start his letters when writing them. He likes to start from the bottom up, and I've been working on getting him to start from the top down.
Here was his best attempt (with enough room to do it in!)

Here is a pile of stuff that we'll be working on next so he can learn the letter "B"! Lots of neat activities to work on!!! I also found a printable for numbers, so we'll start working on recognizing the number 1.

His "B" folder!

And HERE are several boards of cardboard that I glued sheets of "workbox" id tags on to. I saw these and thought that these would make good Memory games! There's pictures and numbers and each card has different colors or movie characters on them. I just glued them to some thick cardboard and then......

....cut them all up into squares and seperated them into little workable piles that Creston can start to play with! I think that he'll like this game and there's several to switch between, so he shouldn't get bored toooo soon!!! I think this would also be a good way to start showing him 2 or 3 letter words once he gets his Alphabet down pat.

O.k.! So..........that's what we've been doing this last week!!!!! Hope that this next week goes as smoothly! I think we may work some on things this weekend. Mark has to work tomorrow, and to Creston, it's all fun anyway! I'd like to go through 2 letters a week instead of just one, but we'll have to see how he does with them!

This and that...

After asking Mark today to help me teach Creston a few things in his workbook that I couldn't figure out how to get him to understand.....and after Mark tried, but couldn't get him to understand it either, we had a little talk (which resulted in ME flopping my head onto my arms on the dining room table and sighing loudly...) and decided that I should focus on the Alphabet and only the Alphabet until he got that down pat. Then Mark also said that I should also focus on having Creston work on his name......tracing the letters...spelling his name.....ect.

I had already decided to work mainly on the Alphabet and had found some activities to focus on, so that wasn't such an up-roar for us to decide to stay away from more advanced things. I just sometimes get frustrated that I'm not able to explain things correctly enough to allow Creston to "Get it" and it makes me sad.

However, we sat down with the following "A" tracing worksheet and he did pretty good with that!

Then, I had found this little printable that showed Upper ad Lower-case "A's" and had Vreston match the big and little a's to the page. He did this really well.

All was going good until the very end when I said "What letter is this again?" and he said "R!!!!" and looked so pleased with himself............head on table again......siiiiiiiiggggghhhhhhh.......

"We're done for the day, Creston....you can go play now....."

Some new ideas!!

I found several great homeschool sites at http://confessionsofahomeschooler.blogspot.com/,
http://www.homeschoolcreations.blogspot.com/ , and http://homeschoolcreations.com/preschoolcorner.html.


I found a lot of neat printables and ideas for teaching the Alphabet! Most sites recomend teaching a letter a week.....we may do 2 a week........we'll see!!! I'm still having trouble getting Creston to recognize the letters, so maybe these ideas will help!!!


Here's a cute printable of little "A"nts. There are several colors and you just cut the BIG A's from the little a's and then mix them all up and have the child put them together!!
Silly face!!! He thought that this was neat!

He did this in no time, so I suppose it was too easy for him, but it drilled the "A" into his brain!!

Then there was a "Put the "A"pples in order biggest to smallest". I didn't explain this too well, but after asking him which one was biggest and which was smallest, he put the rest in order!

He liked this too!

THEN...........Mackie wanted to CUT!!!! Oh me!!! I couldn't find the little scisors, so with me sitting next to him, I let him cut a few times on this big paper! He liked this too!!

It was a neat day! I'm excited to be finding new ideas and different ways that other homeschool parents are teaching their kids!!!