Home Learning Activities

*Warning - Long Post*
*dust dust* *sweep sweep*... I know I've been neglecting this blog badly...

We have been doing home learning activities, but not on a very structured basis... as Tim has been going to school, at 3-yr-old, I don't want him to feel overwhelmed with so much things to learn and work on... so most of the stuff we do at home are rather ad hoc and more laissez faire...

It is my intention to make Tim feel that learning is fun and not stressful... and I want to continue to build that love for learning in him that when he is older he will be a self-motivated learner...

The activities recorded below are at random, as some of them were done quite a while ago, I've totally lost track of the date that they were done... so here goes -
Dinosaurs - Tim is in a huge craze about dinosaurs lately. He watched the "Land Before Time" series a few times and whenever he sees a dinosaurs picture somewhere he'll not let it off... :) such hunger to learn... I do hope such attitude will persist even when he's into primary/secondary school.

We read a few dinosaurs books - "I Wish I had a Dinosaur", "Mad About Dinosaurs", "Katie and the Dinosaurs". While the LadyBird series on Mad about dinosaurs is packed with quite a bit of info about dinosaurs, Tim and my favourite are still stories revolving around dinosaurs. Factual textbook like books are still not to our liking...

I bought a Dinosaurs Sticker Activity Book by Priddy Books and he was so enthusiastic about completing the entire book in one sitting... I had to stop him from doing so... in retrospect, I thought I shouldn't have done that as his love of completing the book showed that he has this huge desire to learn more and work on the activity book more... hmmm...

Most of the time at home, I'll try to create opportunities of learning through play... and some of the following activities were lifted from Montessori books with some modifications here and there -
We played with peg board where the kids get an opportunity to practice eye-hand coordination, build up on the fine motorskills. While Tim has mastered most of the names of the colour palette, he still enjoys grouping the pegs into colours that he likes. In the picture you'll see him grouping all the orange pegs on the side.
A wonderful church friend of mine sew me this set of "Montessori" button board, zipper board and stud board. It was given to me as a gift quite a while ago, and it's only recently that I dragged it out for the kids to play. Tim is still not so good on the button board but he breezed through the zipper board. The studs on the stud board was a little too tiny that the kids had problems manipulating it.

I might create a new set of such boards now that I can sew all these on my own *smile*
We played colour grouping again with the coloured ice cream sticks. Tim is obsessed with the colour orange *grin*
I pulled out a few locks and let Tim had a try in unlocking them. No problem at all for the bigger locks but the smaller ones still takes a bit more practice.
Threading of plastic hair curlers...
Tim has a huge fascination in alphabets. And I thought it's about time I introduce the blending of the letters together and teach him how to read.

I created this board ending with "at" and printed separately the alphabets that form words ending with "at" as well as pictures of those words; such as H-at, B-at, C-at...you get the gist. With this I was able to clearly help Tim learn how to read with something concrete for him to identify the word with. 
Learning how to use the pencil. He is able to draw things that are visibly recognizable by imitating what I've drawn. Sometimes he writes a few alphabets and proudly tells me what they are... *smile* well, not a bad attempt while he still needs more practice.
This year, I've started Tim with workbooks... don't shoot me... I know it's a little too early with such activities especially from one who advocates learning through play...workbooks shouldn't be one of the activities in Tim's everyday routine at all...

But wait! These aren't academic workbooks, they are just play workbooks hahahaha... cut and paste, colour and count 

In one of the cut and paste activity, we read the Humpty Dumpty poem together and then we did the craft and coloured the page... it was easy fun (on my part cos I don't have to search the internet and print all the stuff out) and definitely stress-free!
Here's another cut and paste workbook that has chinese words in it. Do the craft and read the word... it's that easy... :)
Counting and recognizing numbers. This is a simple workbook on counting... the kid is so enthusiastic about working on workbooks, he completed more than 5 pages at one go (with me trying to stop him). Within a day or two the workbook was fully completed. Not bad for a young boy to devour an entire workbook with so much enthusiasm. I hope he won't feel it a dread about workbooks when he's in the school going age.
Something simple I've done with Little Missy. She pulled out this box of flashcard that was put in cold storage for the longest time. And when asked a few of the vege/fruits on the cards she was able to tell me what they are. 

I went further by placing something concrete as I taught her what were the names of the objects. She was able to learn through sight, touch, taste and smell. I pulled out the cards with pictures of potato, ginger and garlic... and told her what they were. 

I've discovered that Little Missy learns better this way ie. concrete + abstract together. Whenever I read books with certain items that she's able to identify, she'd very quickly pull out the object/item from some corners of our house. Such as spider (she'll pull out the plastic toy spider), swim suit (she'll pull her swim suit from the drawer)... etc... I guess she's able to associate better when she's something concrete in front of her... *smile*...

What a joy to be home teaching the kids from the simplest to the most abstract of things... :)