Handmade Christmas - Sight Words Books

One of the christmas gifts I aim to get organised to finish is a small collection of sight words books.  The beginnings are a bunch of sketches which I aim to manipulate with GIMP and the mouse track pad.  So tedious.  I cannot wait to get my Bamboo stylus and Sensu brush for christmas.
I want to bind using the japanese book binding method, Tinker Labs has a great tutorial here.

Gigi and the Bear

So I heard there have never been any bears in Australia or Antarctica?

 

Sight Words with Rod Clement

Sight words are those most common and frequent words used in our everyday reading and writing. Words that may not be easily sounded out and are best learnt to be recognised on sight. These are words that might hold an idea rather than be associated with an image.

My first born is only now coming to a stage where he is starting to ask about words as we read together and learning early literacy with letter tracing at school. He tends to get a bit frustrated with letter tracing though. I have put together my own sight words bingo from Playful Learning.

Making this game was my introduction to site words as a literacy aid.  I love this idea and I loved this introduction and have had it in the back of my mind as we do other activities.  Recently my son has been getting more letter and number exposure with more "practical" tasks like playing Battleships.  This is two-fold learning through play for him and my two year old as they get to exercise their fine motor skills by packing up all the little white and red pegs and they both get to help be part of the letter and number identification on the coordinate grid.

Whilst reading 'Feathers for Phoebe' we have begun, inadvertently, on our sight words journey.  I can't wait to find more of these kinds of books to continue building on these sight words adventures.  Phoebe goes through and chooses from a selection of items until she has completed her transformation to be a spectacularly coloured and feathered bird on her quest to be noticed.  He now identifies easily and calls out 'yes', 'no' and 'maybe' as with each element of her new look Phoebe chooses the wings, crest, tail and chest.

The Path to Literacy

DIY Letter Tracing Cards

Games to Play with Sandpaper Letters

DIY Sandpaper Letters

This weeks parent teacher meeting has brought to light some slow progress on working with letter tracing, so I'm committed to giving some continuing support to my little boy who has just turned four.   There are some fantastic DIY letter tracing projects which I've included above, I've gone with the paper and felt project provided by Themes for Learning and Play on the fantastic Playful Learning blog.  I have a house full of sick people this weekend so this project has been slow to progress.

Things you will need include:

1. fabric glue
2. four sheets of felt 220x305mm sheet (I've stuck with the same colours used by Joey from Themes for Learning and Play, for my little guy there seems to be some anxiety here so the more calming the colour, the better)
3. fabric scissors
4. hole punch (I've used a scrap booking punch which makes a much smaller hole than I intended to use but they've worked out well)
5. white cardboard 300 GSM A3 sheet (with 9 cards per sheet)
6. sewing pins 
7. a tin or box to keep them in once complete.

Joey suggests using some additional tools, this version relies on what I already had available.  The cards turned out less than perfect but they look great and serve their purpose well.  The following are a4 sized JPEGS with the alphabet in 245 px Arial Narrow Condensed Bold.  The lower case 'a' works better as a d with the tail cut off, as one extra pin and cut.  I tried using a stanly knife but that just butchered the acrylic felt so I just pinned them all and cut them out with fabric scissors.

  

 

The card would have been great to cut using some fancy corner cutters but my sub standard stanley knife was no match for the the 300gsm card and I do not have a corner punch, so I just divided the card into nine equal rectangles and cornered them by hand.  They were all a little irregular but not so that it is even really noticeable unless you suffer from OCD.  The a little fabric glue, a toddler patiently waiting and moving the cards to a spot to dry as I stuck them on and some time later I was ready to have dinner.

Thanks to a brand new Razor Zone gaming mouse I had a nice cardboard box to customise for the job of storing the cards.

 

As is suggested by the Montessori home schooling blogs above we have started by just sitting together, at the moment it is just me picking up the cards, making the sound and going through some words that start with that letter and separating the sound to accentuate it's value in the word and tracing.  My son is very disinterested  at the moment so we are traveling around the word like a racing car on a track, always starting at the red dot as our starting line, this seems to be engaging him a little more for now.  There is a learning block that I'm seeing here and like many Mum's I can see where this might have been my fault.  I probably started too early with letter and number  card games and with a salicylate child who preferred to run, move, tip things all over the floor and tear things apart, I did not approach it as calmly as I should have. 

Thanks to Playful Learning's post 8 Literacy Apps for Little Ones, I have tried and love the Demografix Australian School Writing app for ipad.  My four year old and two year old both love it.  One of the previous complaints about this product was the lack of encouragement which the developers have taken on board and released a new version with customisable encouragements.  Can't wait to spend some time finding and recording some encouraging sound bytes.

Story time

One thing I have always done with my children and have always loved myself is reading.  When I was a little girl I remember my special gift always being a new little book.  I remember sitting by myself before I could read and leafing through a pile of picture books with Morty mouse who reminded me of the adorable geckos I would watch on the windows of our house in Malaysia.

There are so many books I have enjoyed with my children and for my first born, who was a terrible sleeper, we would sit together and read Terry Pratchett as part of our seemingly never ending bedtime routine.

There are a number of children's authors and illustrators that I love to read and have bought as many of their books as I can.

• Emily Gravett
• Lynley Dodd
• Oliver Jeffers
• Julia Donaldson
• Anthony Browne
• Graeme Base
• Sara Acton
• Anna Walker

Here are some of the books that I have had a great time reading with my little ones, some for their beautiful illustrations, some for their fantastic rhythm and rhyme and some for the beauty or poignancy of the story.

Flotsam - David Wiesner
This is a magical journey to share with your child.  Mine are one and three years old and still happier to hear me make up the words to accompany these beautiful images and wonderful story but I have noticed more and more my son asking me to make up a story to go with what lives in that house and has been trying to himself.  This is bookshelf treasure.


Hairy Maclary - Lynley Dodd

•   Hairy Maclary from Donaldson's Dairy
•   Slinky Malinky Open the Door
•   Slinky Malinky Scatter Cat
•   Hairy Maclary's Bone
•   A Dragon in a Wagon
•   Hairy Maclary Shoo
•   Schnitzel Von Krumm Forget me Not
•   Hair Maclary's Catwaul Caper
•   Hairy Maclary and Zachary Quack

Lynley Dodd books are wonderful reading.  I was disappointed with the Dudgeon is coming because Lynley Dodd who is always so wonderful with her rhyme and rhythm seems to have sacrificed language to produce this book but my son still loves reading it, he's three and he also likes Dr Seuss which again is all rhyme and nonsense.


The Tale of Despereaux - Kate DiCamillo

This story is bitter sweet.  A pleasure to read, magnificent illustrations by Timothy Basil Ering and a lovely voice throughout.  The characters are human, not always literally, and I will definitely read this again once my children are old enough to grasp the concepts but not too young to be frightened by some of the darker imagery and content in this lovely book.  I went on to buy The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane but am yet to finish this book as there were too many tears to read aloud.


Frog Belly Rat Bone - Timothy Basil Ering
Great book about a boy who wants to find treasure, a monster he creates, some stealthy thieves, and the wonder of life within a small, dry, insignificant looking seed.  This is a book crying out to be followed up with some gardening.  I am yet to put together my only little treasure box filled with colourful seed packets but this is on my list of things to do with the little people in my life.  There are many books I pick up as a consequence of there being something special about the illustrations and this is one of them.  Frog Belly Rat Bone is packed with full page, unique paintings.

Monkey and Me - Emily Gravett
This book has fantastic rhythm that almost feels like your singing a very percussive song.  Gorgeous illustrations with beautiful freehand pencil drawings.   The simplicity of colour and rhythm in this book will make it a favourite.


Again - Emily Gravett
Another wonderful book, written and illustrated by Emily Gravett.  There are two stories in Emily Gravett's books, the written and the visual.  If your child can sit down and follow the images it begins when you look on the inside cover as you watch the young dragon getting ready for bed and ends with an over tired outburst by an increasingly irritated dragon who's mother has hit the wall before him, the ending to so many bedtime routines.  This is a book you and your child will read again and again.  Again?

Where's my Cow - Terry Pratchett
Whether you are a Pratchett fan or not, whether you have read and thoroughly enjoyed Thud or have never even heard of Disc world, this is a great book to read with your little one and has led on to games with my own children.  The game of the book as you read through making the noises of the animals you find who are not your cow will entertain you and your little person over and over again.  This is the favourite book of the fictional one year old in the story and was for my one year old also.