learning letters, part 2

Here, finally, is the second part of learning with letters.  I’m sure none of you were waiting with bated breath.  But it’s good to get rid of that nagging feeling of something unfinished (if only the rest of my to-do list would quit hassling me!).

Here are our sandpaper letters.  I waffled about these for so long, wondering if I should take the time to make them or spend the money to buy them.  Obviously, I decided to make some.  But I hadn’t got very far into the process before I was regretting my decision.   Hacking through that mat board and sandpaper and painstakingly cutting out each letter . . . not exactly worth my time (or my good scissors!), I was thinking.

Of course, I kept at it, since I’d already bought all the materials.  But if I could do it over again, I’d probably just buy a set (or maybe use felt instead of sandpaper).  It’s not that my DIY spirit is weak; there are just other things I’d rather be making.

I used the directions and template from How to Raise an Amazing Child the Montessori Way, but here is a great post with links to lots of resources for making your own.  After cutting out a few, I found this method to be the least frustrating: place your sandpaper gritty side down on your cutting surface.  Place your letter template face down on the back of the sandpaper (so it will look like the letter is backwards).  Use your exacto knife to cut around the letter and through the sandpaper.  If it doesn’t slice all the way through, you might have to use a scissors to cut the letter from the sandpaper.

After seeing this idea in Playful Learning, we made our own alphabet book.  There are endless possibilities with this activity, and I’m sure we’ll end up with dozens of homemade alphabet books before we’re through.  But for the first go, we went with a photo book.

Adeline took most of the pictures herself.  We edited them in Picnik (how I mourn for it!), and then pasted them into a homemade book.

Then Adeline wrote a capital and lowercase letter on each facing page (though sometimes the lowercase are simply small capitals).

Another favorite pastime: using the typewriter.  Adeline is making a word list “of all the words in the world.”  It’s an ongoing project!  This is great to do while Bea is napping, and I can help Adeline spell the words while I’m washing dishes.

yarn along

Reading: I know I’m not the first one to mention it, but we’re in love with Annabelle and her box of never-ending yarn in Extra Yarn.  It was first recommended to us by our librarians (you know that perhaps you are an overly-zealous library patron when they hand you a book you hadn’t reserved with a note — “We thought you would enjoy this” — or perhaps it just means you have really good librarians!).  After the very first reading I ordered my own copy from Amazon.  It’s so great.

Knitting (together!):  Adeline loves the fingerless mitts I won in Svenna’s giveaway, so I’m making some for her.  She also loves the knitting fork she got for Christmas.  I wasn’t sure if she’d be able to do it, but she learned with very little frustration (which is rare with this child).  She’s working on a chain that we plan to weave into a rug – exciting!

yarning along with Ginny

all of a sudden

she went from this (writing with “the bumps”)

to this

She’s been writing us little cards and letters.  So fun!  Of course, she has her own unique spellings (though she’s pretty good at sounding words out), and there are no spaces between the words, and sometimes it’s hard to tell what a letter is supposed to be, so unless I’m watching her write it out, I usually can’t read the finished product.  But, oh how I treasure those little notes!  This is such a wonderfully exciting stage.  And this reminds me that I have yet to post part two of our letter learning.  Will try to do that soon.

nature journal

I was inspired by this article to start keeping a phenology journal (basically a nature diary where you keep track of the weather and changes in seasons).  I couldn’t find a diary or journal I liked, so decided to use a plain notebook to create our own.  I was so excited to find these notebooks that have a list of months and numbers across the top, so I can circle the date for each page, and divide the page up for the next 6 years.  Then Jake burst my bubble by pointing out that circling the date at the top really wasn’t any easier than simply writing it.  Oh, well.  I had to buy three notebooks to have enough pages for 365 days.

Originally, I envisioned this as something Adeline and I would do together, helping us to observe nature more closely.  But so far, I’ve been recording things by myself.  I realized that we already talk about weather & wildlife & changes in the seasons very regularly, and it’s just easier for me to do the writing alone at the end of the day.  Some day I’m sure we’ll take turns writing in it.

As a child I always liked stories where someone finds an old diary or scrapbook or a trunk full of old photos and letters in the attic, and some mystery ensues as they try to piece together the past, perhaps visiting a library to delve through dusty archives or use a microfilm machine in the process (what, me, a library nerd? indeed!).  I’m still a great fan of epistolary novels.  Perhaps this is why I’ve always been a compulsive chronicler: journals, scrapbooks, photo albums, shoeboxes full of letters & cards, even this blog.  I secretly fantasize about my great-great-grandchildren coming across these objects someday and piecing together a bit of their ancestral history.

But for all that chronicling, I’ve never ever done a daily diary.  I worried a bit that this would be too much for me, and become just one more chore that I have to do at the end of the day.  And honestly, some days it feels like that; and on those days I just don’t write much.  But mostly it’s fun, and I’m looking forward to finding similarities and differences in the days once we’ve been doing this for a few years.  And perhaps becoming just a little more in tune with my natural surroundings.  I’d love to be able to say old-timer things like, “Oh, fog this morning; there’ll be snow in six months.”  Or maybe not.

 

learning letters, part 1

We’ve got an abecedarian on our hands.  Adeline’s interest in letters and words is growing, so we’ve been trying to encourage her with some fun and games.

I’ve been looking for a Montessori movable alphabet set, and found this one on Amazon via Ginny at Small Things.  As soon as we got it, Adeline set to work writing messages.  Can you see “I love you, mom,” and “I love you, dad”?  She also likes to put together her own “words” and then asks me to pronounce what she’s written.

I just read (and loved) The Write Start, where I picked up the idea to play “alphabet store.”  While I sometimes have a hard time getting into the spirit of play, I think I enjoyed this game as much as Adeline did.  There are so many possibilities!  We used our alphabet puzzle and Monopoly money, and I’m envisioning sometimes using our movable alphabet so we can buy more than one of each letter, or our alphabet blocks so we can build ABC cities.  (Hmm, do we possibly have too many alphabet-related toys?)

Playing store led to this game which I like to call “letter-carrier.”  We were playing “mailbox” one day, where I would pretend to be the mail-carrier and put random things into this miniature mailbox (which I got at a craft store so long ago that I don’t know what I meant to do with it).  Well, I grabbed one of our foam bathtub letters and put it in the mailbox, and a new game was born.

I deliver a different letter each “day,” (Adeline pretends to sleep in between) and when I’ve brought her 3 of them, I ask if she can put them together to make a word.

I love the Monstessori sand writing activity, but spending good money on a sand writing tray seemed a bit preposterous to me.  So we went with the cornstarch-on-baking-sheet method (which I think I read in The Write Start).  It was fun; the “sand” stayed in pretty well.  But trying to get the cornstarch back into any sort of container without spilling half of it was a bit of a challenge, nay, a huge pain in the butt — enough to make me re-think finding an affordable sand tray were the sand can just stay put.  This one might do.

Stay tuned for part 2, which will include our homemade alphabet book, and possibly sandpaper letters.