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.

Montessori on Etsy

       
   
   
 
 
 

Too tired to paint

Church renovation, work, taking advantage of Penguins unsolicited children's picture book submissions, cupcakes and birthdays.

We have been renovating a 100 year old church for the past two and a half years, waiting on council approval and then a bank that would lend to us was the most time exhaustive part.  It is looking amazing though.

mezzanine feels like land of the giants, everything is at a much higher level than would be practical for me.

I am hoping that all of the inclusions and fittings will be started soon, I cannot wait for this to be finished.

As I am focusing on all things creative in my life here is a paper doll project I derived from one of my paintings.  Enjoy.

Back at work and the one thing I didn't even realise that I missed...work spam.

Sick children, scones and painting

It has been a very productive painting day for me and my two little sickies.  My oldest ripped out three awesome paintings whilst my little one was napping.  Super sweet even though he has had some salicylate challenge foods over the past two days.  Some bad outcomes after lunch including zucchini with the skin on and a pear with its skin left on.  It's such a challenge to get it right.  He was at such a good baseline yesterday a bowl full of blue berries and strawberries had no effect but the extra little bits today just added up to too much.  I wish there was a weight and food calculator for salicylates.

And another one that I have started reworking.  This was one that I started and then had many little hands take over, it is again mine and I have been defending my right to paint on my own with this one.

Spiritualitree

Yes, it's one of those terms, hybrid terms that think they're very clever.  It's a tree filled with spiritual apes.  I did this sketch and started painting this many years ago and am really happy to have attacked and finally finished it.  I can't remember why I started this piece, what I was thinking but it has come down to just enjoying painting.

 Finally finished and pretty satisfied with this one.  Lots of intricate work and when it's back in its frame it looks good, complete, ready to hang at the Curtin Primary exhibition.

GCAP Exhibition

 Heading back to Canberra with a beautiful waxing moon in the distance above the wind farms near lake George.  Looking forward to making a trip to see these graceful monolithic turbines up close, with a picnic and a sketchpad.  A little bit hectic getting back to prepare for the GCAP exhibition.  This is my first exhibition since my deviation into the world of Unix, IT and motherhood.

 GCAP have a great little art space in the middle of suburbia in Harrison which opened with an exhibition of local artists on Saturday.  It was great meeting some of the Canetsy members and other Canberra artists.  Surprised that I wasn't more nervous to be putting my work out for public consumption, nice and relaxed atmosphere of artists happy to be coming together to exhibit in this new space.  Diverse works from local artists.