Pre-school activities
This is a diary of Denali's (3yrs in June 2007) home pre-schooling. Mainly to document her travels but with the hope that someone else might find this useful.
http://www.handwritingforkids.com/handwrite/manuscript/javascripts/_my8linestext.htm this website provides 8 lines where you can enter the text and it gives it out on a double ruled line with space to practise.
Flag colouring pages at http://www.fahnenversand.de/fotw/flags/cbk.html. We colour these, cut them out, glue a toothpick to them, and stick them (with blu tack) onto a world map that is hung on the wall.
Please check here for months past:
05-05-08: Learned the names of a variety of sea creatures. Named the various parts of a fish. Looked at pictures of various different fishes.
07-05-08: Visited the zoo and checked out the lions and other East African animals. Read 1a in the ladybird series. Denali got halfway through without any help and then gave up. Next she practised writing some words, first on dotted lines and then free hand. Her writing is pretty okay. We read some stories from Aseops Fables together. Denali has to read all the words that she has learned.
09-05-08: Learned about fish and their parts.
12-05-08: Completed activities on fish from our science book. Activities consisted of naming the parts of a fish, identifying fish from other sea creatures, identifying sea creatures from non-sea creatures. Wrote some "oo" in sinhala. Did some colouring. Read sinhala vegetable book and gamaralai maha yakai. Practised words from Peter and Jane. Read 1a completely and half of 1b. I'm surprised that denali doesn't get sick of reading the same books!
14-05-08: Finally finished ready 1b!! Completed some more writing and then started reading 2a.
16-05-08: Deruni was sick and didn't sleep in the afternoon. No school.
19-05-08: Tried identifying the wild flowers that we observed at Henry Cowell State Park http://picasaweb.google.com/kids.cheng/Wildflowers. Finished science book #3 i.e. did the review. Started on book 4. The first topic was "push and pull". Completed with no problems. Read "Arthur's chickpox". Wrote, on dotted lines, has, ball, tree, the, and, shop and toy. Read the first few pages of ladybird keyword series book 2a. Rehung our world map and denali placed the flags back on the correct countries. Read about a kenyan family together with Denali.
21-05-08: We started with some alphabet work, writing "H" and "h". Denali wrote the following words on dotted lines: Pat, here, and, is, the, dog. We then read ladybird book 2a. Denali can get about halfway through. Unfortunately there are too many new words. So we read some other books where these new words appear. One of them was "Ollie" which she can almost read by herself. Denali did some colouring. Denali identifies 16 words on her flash cards.
23-05-08: Sinhala, we did the letter "ra". Wrote it on dotted lines. Actually we wrote a whole page of it. Read a couple of books identifying the letters 'ee', 'oo', and 'ooo'. Worked on writing the number "8". Denali then went ahead and wrote some other numbers in her number book. She can almost count to 20. Playing hide and seek seems to help!
26-05-08: Memorial day
28-05-08: Practised writing on dotted lines. Working on words from the keyword series. Read book 2a. Can read it almost half way. Read "The Greedy Dog". Coloured a fish colouring page and a tree colouring page. Wrote the alphabet using stamps, and then wrote "fish" using the stamps. Denali recognises 25 words on her flash cards. Denali counts to 20 (well almost).
29-05-08: Worked on parts of an animal, what animals use to move, what animals eat, and which animals lay eggs and which give birth to their young. All in very simple words using our science book, with lots of activities. Cut out animals to make a collage of animals that eat meat and those that dont.
30-05-08: Completed writing the number 9 and 10 then 1 - 10 six times. Counted figures and then wrote the number in a box. Learned the letter "a", well how ever you write the first letter in the sinhala alphabet!! Read some sinhala books. Completed the animal collage from yesterday.
02-06-08: Completed a science unit on plants. Reviewed the parts of a plant, fruit of plants, uses of plants, and what a plant needs to grow. Denali did some colouring. We read half of 2a, went through our word flash cards. Denali did 28 words today. She completed the second activity of book 1c. Which was to finish the following "Here is Jane. I like J___." Except that she had to write to whole thing out by herself (not just write in "ane"). We read "Knuffle bunny too" and "Biscuit wants to play".
04-06-08:
06-06-08:
16-06-08: Completed a science unit on magnets. Denali took her magnets around the room to find what they would be attracted to. Completed a unit on identifying objects made of wood. Read "Mr. Mean" by Rodger Hargreaves. Read ladybird key word book 2a from front to back.
18-06-08: Read 2a. Did the fourth lesson in book 1c. Using the flash cards practised words. Denali likes to spread them out in a chain and read them. Seems like she's trying to put together a sentance but she knows that what she puts together does not make sense. Vocabulary is up by 1 to 31 words. Although I believe she knows more than this. Read a book about a farmer and then coloured colouring page with vegetables and a V. Denali has trouble distinguishing a V from a Y. Also included playtime into today's school since deruni was awake for half of school.
20-06-08: Went camping to China Camp SP.
23-06-08: Didn't do much because we just got back from camping yesterday and we were all still tiered. Read some books, did some writing but that was about it.
25-06-08: Denali read 38 words from her flash cards. Almost done with the second book in the keyword series. Having trouble getting to the end of it because she always wants to read the book from the begining. Wrote two pages of words on the dotted lines. Completed another writing excersie from the book 1c. Wrote out the 6 words that Denali is having trouble with (1 from 1a and the others from 2a). Read "greedy dog" together. Read a couple of other books to her.
26-06-08: Cooking class! Made a spinach quish. Denali washed and chopped the spinach! Also made beads from pink sculpy clay. baked pretty well.
27-06-08: dont remember
30-06-08: For science we learned about electricity, what uses electricity, what NOT to do with electricity. Also learned that machines made certain jobs easier. Read some, coloured some. Read about philladelphia and pennsylvania. Not much in terms of good books. Most contain rather disturbing material for a 4 year old. Guns, war, slavery wouldn't be too bad if I could find a book without pictures!
02-07-08: Coloured a picture "up umbrella up" to learn to read the word "up". Read the first 4 pages of key word series book 3a. Denali's at 42 words with the flash cards. She did some writing on the dotted lines. Didn't get to do much else, deruni didn't nap.
we're going to start with reading the time! here are some worksheets http://homeschooling.about.com/od/freeprintables/ss/mathtime1print.htm
Denali has now started going to pre-school out side of our home. However, her home schooling stopped a bit before this because Deruni no longer takes an afternoon nap. Once Deruni is capable of applying herself and I can find stuff for her to do I will continue with teaching them both at home.
The only thing that Denali is continuing to learn is how to read. She can read at least 80 words by sight as of the first of september and knows much more than that.
TO DO:
http://www.earlylearning-chinese.com/coloringpage/D/D-dog-gou.gif
work on sequences and completing them. Use cut out paper shapes and wooden geo shapes. then go onto the worksheets from http://www.kidzone.ws/prek_wrksht/math-readiness/patterns.htm
akuru mihira 1 http://www.lanka.info/shops/booksStore/SrilankaBooks_Preview.jsp?id=book0000266&authorName=J%20B%20Dissanayaka&searchText=&sc=52&co=Children
For further reading:
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/montessori/method/method.html