Satori Smiles

One of our first times taking advantage of the special HWT handwriting paper… The object is to fill the entire shaded square, but I haven’t pushed it too hard yet. It comes with 4 different types of shaded squares.
First, the paper with everything on it, so Satori simply copies the letters/numbers:

Next, her doing them all on her own with no help. I dictated the letters/numbers to write, but she can ALMOST do it all by herself. She always forgets the J and N.

All pretty legible, there are just a few letters she has to practice more, but part of it is that she is only 4 yet and is still developing her coordination I suppose. Needs to work on her 8, and making sure her 9 is facing the right way. We’re almost done learning our lower-case letters and then we’ll take a month to review and practice before we start our First Grade Printing book.

Satori loves to practice her handwriting. She has tons of little journals. They don’t say anything that makes sense, but this week she’s been trying her darndest to sound out words, so that if I really try to read them, I might be able to get the gist of some phrases.

A few weeks ago we started the Kindergarten HWT book – “Letters and Numbers for Me”. I had typed up a lesson schedule to go over a few pages a day, but she would wake up and ask to work on her new orange book, so I went with it. She’s now finished her Capital letters review and we’re *finally* to the lowercase letters. If you read my blog, you’ll know that we’re quite excited about it. So I celebrated this event with her by making an official Handwriting Book for her to keep her handwriting practice samples.

Satori's Handwriting Book

As you can see, it’s one of those floppy 3-ring binders with a place to display a cover page. So we went to town decorating a cool cover page, complete with glitter, jewels and stickers! Our new HWT paper arrived this week, so we will stock it with this. The bottom sheets are the Gray Block Paper for capital letter practice, which includes 4 different types of sheets – Starting Corner, Center Starting, Alphabet/Number and Blocks for Words. The top sheets is the Wide Double Line Notebook paper for sentences that include lowercase.

HWT paper

Here’s a sample of her capital letters she did a few days ago. We will still need to practice them, but they’re looking good!

She loves her Handwriting Without Tears program, each workbook page has little illustrations to color, which she loves. She’s not a workbooky gal, but she loves working on her book, but she goes so fast on the practice and doesn’t like to be told “to fill in the gray squares” or to take her time. We also love all the extra multisensory activities that reinforce her letter formation.

I have been so busy lately that I haven’t had time to upload some photos and other random thoughts I’ve been meaning to! First off, the weather here has been ABSOLUTELY PERFECT! Mid-70′s, the perfect mix of sun and occasional cloud… We’ve been playing outside on the new playset, been camping, hiking, geocaching, enjoying the outdoors. Thus, not a lot of sit-down learning going on, but no worries, she’s only 4.

Satori finished the first Handwriting Without Tears workbook, and is now starting the Kindergarten workbook – Letters and Numbers For Me. She loves all the coloring in it and then does a bit of letter practice, hehe. She wakes up in the morning, wanting to work on her “orange book”. She started going through it faster than I was ready, so I hadn’t even looked at the teacher’s manual. Come to think of it, I probably didn’t even need to purchase the TM (teacher’s manual).

Letters and Numbers for Me

The upside of this, is that we’ll get to our lowercase letters that much sooner!

I quickly made an order for the gray block handwriting paper that the HWT program uses, in fact, it was my very first order from Rainbow Resource, which is probably the ultimate, grand-daddy homeschooling online supply site. (They could use a modern interface though, me speaking as a former web programmer.)

I normally don’t combine different thoughts on one blog post, but here’s some more…

Satori has been wanting to make a cake for a few months now. (I hate making cakes, I don’t really like them and they never turn out, I blame it on the altitude as always.) But after she finished her above HWT workbook, our very first official curriculum workbook finished, I thought we could celebrate with Pinkalicious Cake! She also finished Lesson 50 on Ordinary Parents Guide to Teaching Reading and Lesson 5 of All-About-Spelling.

Pinkalicious Cake

We got the idea from a book called Pinkalicious, but it was about Pink Muffins.

Yum!!

Snapped some photos before I cleaned up from the Dino party… We had fun eating the spewn lava – Pop Rocks!

Dino volcano

And a sample of all the dino posters that Satori drew all by herself, no prompting from me… I like those trees she’s been drawing recently!

Brachiosaurus and tree

We’ve been having fun geocaching a little bit every weekend. This has been a hobby I have wanted to get into for years, if it was just me, I’d have found hundreds already. But I want it to be mostly a family activity, so waiting for the time when David has a free afternoon and it’s a nice day is rare. You can always see what our total geocache count is by looking at the real-time chart up on the right side.

Geocaching has brought our 4-WD truck out a lot, here we are in “our big backyard”. Places that are pieces of paradise to me, with its beauty and tranquility. And the occasional herd of cows in the road.

few miles behind our house, on 4wd roads…

This blog post might come in handy, as on BOTH homeschooling forums I frequent, there were people asking about all the extra tools (aside from the workbook/manual) for the Handwriting Without tears program. Here are a few of those “extras” in action… I gave links to my HWT posts and now whenever I write a post about Handwriting Without Tears, I tag it as “hwt” and this link: http://satorismiles.com/tag/hwt/ will show all related posts! I am doing the same for any other curriculum (MUS, AAS, SOTW, OPG, ETC).

Our next lesson (lesson 14) in Math-U-See (MUS) will cover counting to 20, but it requires that Satori write the numerals. So I spent the beginning and middle of this week reviewing handwriting numbers 0-10, we’ve never “officially” spent time learning to write numerals correctly. She was starting to write them backwards and incorrectly.

So we went over our number pages in the back of the Handwriting Without Tears Student workbook (“Get Set for School”) and using my new StartWrite Software (I will dedicate a blog post to this soon), we went over the correct formation of the numbers 1-10. Today we added multi-sensory fun with our Play Dough and See and Stamp Screen.

Numeral 3 on Stamp and See Screen

We usually first start with the Stamp and See Screen using the magnetic stamps that come in HWT’s famous 4 shapes. Then Satori would draw them on. After 3 days of going over numbers in the workbook, handwriting sheets, and this, Satori can write a numeral on demand! She’s got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, and 10 down pat. The numeral 8 she used to draw with 2 circles on top of each other, but now we are following HWT’s method of drawing a Capital S and then back up. Her 8′s turn out a bit flat, but she’s improving! Good enough for me until this fall when we tackle it all over again in more depth in HWT’s Kindergarten course “Letters and Numbers For Me”.

We also reviewed the capital letters C, O, Q, G, S, and J with our Roll-A-Dough Letters. Since it was going so well, I even snuck in the next lesson, and we formed the numerals 1-10, as well as the next set of letters (D, P, B, R, K, A) on our Stamp and See.

Roll-A-Dough Letters - Letter J

Handwriting Without Tears (at least the Pre-K/K programs) is extremely flexible. We’re tackling many letters and numbers at once, as Satori already is familiar with all her capitals and numerals. So far it has been worth it, even at our accelerated pace, as her handwriting has improved tremendously. In the next workbook, we’ll be perfecting the capitals, and starting lowercase.

Satori loves to write so much that I can’t wait until we tackle lowercase.

Satori and I spent the morning playing with our Handwriting Without Tears (HWT) manipulatives. It really is the first time I pulled these out! We are in our Pre-K book, and just got over the capital letters L, F, E, H, T, I, and U. Today we reviewed by feeling with our hands the correct formation of the letters. First up was the Stamp and See Screen.

HWT Stamp and See

Then on to the Roll-A-Dough letters and rolled little red snakes to form the letters.

HWT Roll-A-Dough Letters

I am pretty confident she’s got this set of capital letters down now. Next HWT lesson, is on to the Magic C!

As we explore new programs and curriculums, I will obsessively blog and share photos of our experiences. I know when I research new homeschooling programs, I really, really appreciate it when I can see these curriculums in action, with descriptive details and photos. So I hope to help out a few families with our detailed experiences.

Mat Man

Mat Man is one of the activities using the wooden shapes of Handwriting Without Tears (HWT). He’ll help your children visualize drawing people in a more detailed way. So we built him yesterday while listening to our HWT CD.  Here is our Mat Man:

And here’s Satori’s drawing of him. Compared to her drawing on the previous post on Thursday, this one is less pretty, but does have eyebrows, nice hands and legs.

Satori's Mat Man drawing

Then we started our wooden pieces with just 4 shapes to make the first 5 letters. The wooden shapes include: Big Line, Little Line, Big Curve, and Little Curve. Together, they’ll make all but two of Capital Letters. Here’s our capital E sitting on the blue mat that we used with Mat Man.

HWT wooden shapes

Next week we’ll be forming approximately 5 letters a day to finish the alphabet. Then we’ll take the rest of the summer going more slowly taking each letter and learning how to form it correctly. Satori already knows all her letters, but does not form them all correctly. So by sticking to our HWT schedule, by August we’ll have all our capital letters down pat.

Many months back I decided to use the Handwriting Without Tears program, after careful research and seeing how many other homeschoolers love the program. (From now on I’ll refer to it as HWT.) If you read my blog back in March or so, you’ll see me talk about it. We got the Pre-K  Get Set For School program, which uses all kinds of multi-sensory activities to help preschoolers retain and have fun learning. It covers so many other preschool necessities, like fine and gross motor control, social skills and much more. I love it. But after all that talk, we hadn’t even “started” it! I guess Satori was already writing all her capital letters and loved doing so, so it wasn’t a big priority at the time. However, now IS the time to get her on the right track to handwriting. So this summer, we will finish our Pre-K program, which is for 4 year olds. Correct some of her bad habits, learn numbers, get her writing with more confidence.

Last night I stayed up until 4am planning out  our schedule for the summer (actually not a big deal for me, I’m a night owl). Since Satori does already know most of this, I accelerated it by 2-3 times the suggested pace. Today we kicked it off by started the “Check Readiness” test, our very first “test”! She sailed past pretty much everything. Below it is testing to see if she knows her colors, objects, and can color in the lines relatively well, with a good grip.

HWT Check Readiness test

The tiny FLIP crayons are purposely small so children develop a good grip close to the tip, but here she could’ve had even finer control probably if she gripped it further down the crayon.

Test - page 1

Page 1, pretty good, but I know she can do better making circles!

Next up was drawing a person, and I asked her to draw herself. This was testing to see if she included enough “people parts”. Most kids at this age don’t include body, limbs, etc… Below you can see she doesn’t include legs (maybe it was a long dress?) and a nose (she doesn’t think she’s good at “noses”), but otherwise, I’m pretty impressed. I did not assist at all, but she was telling me what she was drawing, the detail on the shoes, the sleeves on the dress, and the fact that her ears are under her hair. If you know Satori very well, most likely you’ve received a handwritten card from her in the past year, so you can see if she’s improved at all.

Person drawing

Page 2. Testing for letters, numbers, name. Satori already can recognize pretty much all her letters, both upper and lower case. I haven’t worked on that much at all, she just picked it up in a few sessions. Numbers, a month ago she had problems with 7 and 9 every now and then. Today she just forgot her 9. No worries, we’ll also pick up on math this summer and she’ll master that no problem. She can write her name much better than that, pesty mama was hovering over her trying to see where she started her letters (I had to put a dot where she started each letter), and nosing in the huge, invasive camera like I always do, hehe.

HWT test Page 2

Here’s my schedule I mapped out until the wee hours of this morning. We already finished Day 1 in a few easy minutes. It’s already quite an accelerated schedule, I might accelerate it a tad more, but I really only want to spend a few minutes a day, as she’s still a preschooler.

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=rMCr_PoeksBq8ySzDPsvsBA

The above link will bring out to my online Google spreadsheet, no login required. I will be updating and refining this in the next week. I know we’ll be able to finish “Pre-K Get Set for School” this summer, and by this fall, start the Kindergarten Letters and Numbers for Me program. Depending how Satori goes with the Pre-K one, we might even start by August of this summer.