Satori Smiles

Today Satori and I did our “Three Little Pigs” Literature Pocket. Daddy was busy watching football, so we didn’t have the pleasure of his company.

Satori usually likes to act  out stories like this with dad, myself and her, but since we only had two people, I decided to spice it up a tad by creating the story physically.

We didn’t have a Big Bad Wolf or 3 little Pigs, but we did have an Andrewsarchus (prehistoric wolf-like mammal predator) and 3 little Penguins. All the materials were within 3 yards of our deck.

First house – flimsy straw!

Second penguin’s house made of sticks (and bark):

Finally, a house made of stone that the Big Bad Andrewsarchus could not blow down!

Okay, so it’s not an actual treehouse, it’s the playset my dad built in July. I thought we’d do two lessons in the “treehouse” today for fun. Every now and then we’d be enthralled with a beautiful hummingbird, a loud whirring grasshopper thingie, and a “whiff” of flowers (“whiff” being one of the words we learned today).

I love how the OPG book cover matches the sky here! I should have brought my camera up in the treehouse, the view was beautiful.

Satori has been learning so fast lately, I hardly feel I am “teaching” her. Here’s what we worked on for reading today, you may want to click the picture to see it better.

OPG Lesson 63

We use a small whiteboard for our lessons, we don’t use any flashcards that are optional to purchase with the book. Most days we use a little bit larger whiteboard, the size of the book itself. Then we can fit multiple sentences/paragraphs on it. It is magnetic and has a blank white side, and a lined side. Lately, we’ve been using this tiny one word/phrase lined whiteboard.

Satori is not picking up her own books yet and reading them, even though I have BOB and Nora Gaydos books laid out in strategic spots, but I am not worried. Just yesterday we were at Sam’s Club, and all of a sudden she was saying “Sam’s Club” over and over excitedly. On the shopping cart handle, were the words that she read. She continued to read all our groceries: GLAD, EGGO, and much more.

Here’s the All About Spelling lesson we did today. She’s learned SH, TH, and CH pretty well now. Normally we do most work on the 2′x3′ magnetic whiteboard, but we couldn’t fit that in our treehouse today. Besides, she loves to write on paper. Here I dictated words and short 2-3 word phrases and she wrote them on her paper.

AAS - Lesson 12

She’s a pretty good speller actually, she masters everything we learn. The only issue she’s having is sometimes she spells “e” for the short “i”. I ask her to read what she wrote, and then she’ll quickly redo it with an “i”. Also, about 50% of the time, she will use a “z” for an “s”, like in the word “has”, but she’s getting better.

To non-homeschoolers, this stuff sounds pretty meaty for a 4 year old, but we only do lessons when she wants to, and keep them short. I simply introduce something new and she learns it and we practice it a few times. We don’t make lessons long and boring. If I can tell she isn’t enjoying herself, I stop. If I feel she doesn’t like the curriculum we’re using, I am not afraid to switch to something new, as we did with math by switching to RightStart.

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Oop, I just got 10 letters, most of them asking to go to the library! We better go to the Boulder Creek Festival now and hopefully see our friend and her new baby girl! “Mom  Can you go to the library. You can get books. You better bring a list mom. – Satori”

MOM, CAN U GO TOO THE LIBABY. YOO GIT BUC.

- SATORI

A drizzly stay-home Saturday on a holiday weekend… I decided to pull out our Evan-Moor Literature Pocket – Folktales & Fairytales. There are 7 favorite stories, from Goldilocks to Little Red Riding Hood, and activities to do with all. You make a “pocket” to put your finished items in. The whole family joined in to do these activities.

David acting goofy. Here he is helping cut while Satori is coloring her first book “The Little Red Hen”.

The Literature Pocket cover page:

Doing one of the activities, matching animal sounds to the animals and making a book. Satori knew how to sound out all the sounds except for “neigh”.

Here’s our completed “Little Red Hen” pocket! Satori wanted to do another story immediately, but we will have to wait until next weekend.

Next, we did the first lesson out of Draw Write Now drawing books. We did a little duck way back in February for Ping, today, we did a hen and made her red to go along with our Satori.

Draw Write Now our fun drawing books suitable for Satori’s  young age, and also has some copywork, which we did not do today, all Satori wrote was the name of the book. Here’s her finished drawing:

Today we did Lesson 6 out of First Language Lessons, I haven’t been focusing much on this, as it’s for first-grade level, but we both enjoy it and it’s super simple and easy. I then read this poem “The Caterpillar”, which was our 5th time of hearing the poem. I did not narrate this poem as many times as the book suggested. I haven’t ever required her to recite it nor did I expect her to anytime soon, but an hour later, I overheard her reciting it from memory today! I grabbed the video camera and asked her to do it again. She didn’t get the author’s name exactly right (Christina Rossetti), but the rest she got down perfectly!

The Caterpillar
by Christina Georgina Rosetti

Brown and furry
Caterpillar in a hurry;
Take your walk
To the shady leaf or stalk.

May no toad spy you,
May the little birds pass by you;
Spin and die,
To live again a butterfly.

Today was Friday and Daddy was working from home. We waited to do school until he was done with work, so he got a glimpse of our day.

In AAS lesson 2 they start you listening for the sounds in words. One of the tools you’ll use is their colorful translucent tokens that you line up, and pull towards you as you say each sound in a word. Satori has a thing about lizards and amphibians ever since we studied them this summer, so as a reward for sounding out a word, she gets to free one lizard. Then they all line up and get to watch Satori work!

AAS Tokens and lizards

I found these lizards at Target for $2.99 in their party favor section, and Satori went nuts over them. They match our AAS tokens quite nicely! However, I’m not sure it’s ideal to have these little lizards around, she starts playing with them a tad too much…

Satori narrates our new book we just made today – Vicky and the Big Mess. She is so proud of her books! This is our book we made to illustrate the concept of personification which we learned from Katy and the Big Snow.

This week we studied Katy and the Big Snow, about a hardworking, strong, red snowplow named Katy who helps the town. Today was FIAR Math day, and it was simple to count things in the book, so we’re combining a few Language Arts and Art concepts learned, particularly PERSONIFICATION – where we give human traits to non-living objects, and we’ll take this to illustrate a book.

First we looked at Katy and the artwork in the book. We picked out 3 colors (red, yellow and green), same as used in the book and Satori went to work drawing Katy the snowplow with her “human eyes”. Here it looks like she personified the house (which for some reason is on stilts) too!

I had a new Bare Books order I was trying to hide from Satori for the right time, but she kept finding it. She was not going to rest until we made a new book! So this was the perfect opportunity to apply the concept of Personification. I had her choose an inanimate object – gave her a choice of vacuum or car and she also threw in a lightbulb and mop. She ended up choosing a vacuum. Then we chose a name for her – Vicky. I asked her to give her human characteristics – friendly and clean. Together we mapped out a plot, complete with climax!

Vicky is a blue and orange vacuum cleaner who is clean and friendly. She is proud of her clean living room floor.

In the book, something dreadful happens and Vicky and her friend Molly the Mop swoop/sweep in to save the day!

For Language Arts FIAR day, today we dramatized the story of Katy and the Big Storm by Virginia Lee Burton. Luckily, I had Miss Mayor Satori to help me plan out the city.

This is our second time using a compass for FIAR, and this time Satori knew exactly what a compass was for, and what the “N” means. We used our compass key to layout the map of Geoppolis, which isn’t exactly straight up and down for north.

Together Mayor Satori and I built the city of Geoppolis, complete with roads, signs, buildings, a water tower, ice pond, and the city vehicles.

And an aerial view. (Click the picture for bigger detail.)

One day it started to snow. and it went on all day. Looks like a Big Snow! Everyone and everything was stopped, except KATY!

She plowed out the city of Geopolis. In doing so, Katy helped the police protect the city, the postmaster deliver the mail,  the Telephone and Electric Company repair their poles, the Water Department fix the water main, the doctor help the patient get to the hospital, the fire chief put out a fire, and so on… Katy helped save the town!

Finally the town could move again. In the process, as we traveled to East, West, North and South Geoppolis, we also got nice practice with our cardinal directions. FIAR rocks!

After we determined the city was safe and sound, Mayor Satori decided to have some fun in the snow!

After mopping and a shower, we also learned the literary device of personification – where Katy was a hard working snow plow that was given human qualities. And as always, we learned some new vocabulary:

Tomorrow is Art day so mama has to quickly research up some fun and cool snow crafts!

Ooh, I just googled “katy and the big snow fiar” and guess whose blog came up NUMBER ONE? (As a former web programmer, it seems easy for my websites to rise to the top in Google, but it’s always a pleasant surprise.)

http://www.google.com/search?q=katy+and+the+big+snow+fiar&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS293US294

I wanted to take my time with the 3 R’s, but Satori just seems so eager to learn. Keep in mind we haven’t really worked on any of this, except for what most parents teach their children at home – learning the alphabet song, a few letters, numbers 1-10, and writing her own name. The Five in a Row program we are doing suggests supplemental 3 Rs (reading, writing, arithmetic). So I guess it’s time!

READING

The other day Satori asked me, “I’m smart, aren’t I?” And I said of course you are! And she replied, “Then why can’t I read?”

Then let’s start some reading preparedness. Tonight I tested her to see how much of the alphabet she knows. We did this by going “fishing” with our magnetic fishing pole and catching magnetic letters. (I did this for the fun factor and to make sure we got random letters.) Like I said in the previous post, she knew almost all her letters minus about 5. She knew about half the sounds the letters made. These were capital letters, next time we’ll try lower-case.

Then I opened up a new DVD that a lot of people recommended as being very helpful – Leap Frog’s Letter Factory.

Look at that, a full 5-star review with 610 reviews! As a daily Amazon surfer, I’m impressed. And after watching it for our very first time, Satori said she loved it. The video was catchy and taught letter sounds in unbelievably memorable ways. Indeed, we went through the entire alphabet 10 minutes later, and she remembered almost all of the letter sounds, even better than I did! What a great investment, and I’m was kind of leery about buying such a “commercial” item.

WRITING

Satori seems so adamant about writing that I think I will start helping her learn how to write. I’ve really done nothing with her at home except a few times in writing her name. I am hesitant at having Satori start to write, as I’ve read that preschoolers may not have the dexterity to write yet, and could become frustrated.

But especially with our new pen pal, a 4 year old girl who wants to practice her handwriting, I think this is going to make her want to write even more.

I’m eyeing  Handwriting Without Tears or HWT as it teaches children handwriting in a variety of hands-on, multisensory methods, using dough, wood pieces, little crayons/chalk, music, etc… I’ve heard sooo much about this program.

‘RITHMETIC

Again, we’re going for the hands-on approach, and I’m expecting our Math U See program to arrive tomorrow, and “Lentil Science” within the week. We’ll have more to say about these once we try them.

Last weekend David purchased the Reader Rabbit Kindergarten Ages 4-6 video game, which has basic math addition and subtratction, she is trying so hard to do these, but has never been introduced to these concepts. Hopefully by summer, she’ll be able to do these on her own. By the way, Satori has never shown an interest in computers until about a month ago. Now she has been hogging my kitchen computer and wants her own!