I've been on a serious break from blogging lately. With moving, buying a house and having a baby, I'm pretty sure that I have enough good excuses to go around, but I'm ready for more structure to our days and I'm ready to start getting back into the swing of things with Tot School!
We finally have our printer set up so I can use some pre-made Letter of the Week ideas, and the boys are talking a lot more than they were three months ago, so I think it's an appropriate time to start alphabet activities, counting, colors and much more.
For anyone who has used alphabet 'curriculum' before... how did you decide the order to teach them in? Did you go alphabetically or based on the letters that they were capable of saying (mine can say all the P B D E type letters but not the N J G type letters). Would you recommend teaching numbers at the same time or as seperate units? I don't want to overwhelm them with information all at once, but I don't want them to get bored either. What about uppercase vs lowercase? Do you teach them at the same time? What materials have you found particulary useful with alphabet, color and number lessons?
I'm planning on using September to create my plan of attack and starting up in October - so send your ideas my way!
4 comments:
yay for getting settled a little! Sammy learned all of his letters and their sounds form the Leap Frog Letter Factory DVD after watching it 3 or 4 times (not in a row). We used letter stuff mostly for me to think of ideas and organize myself. I hope that helps :-)
Advice from my mother: In reading, we encounter lower-case letters MUCH more often than upper-case. In alphabet books, blocks, magnets, and every other commercially available alphabet product (soup!), usually only upper-case is used. This seems like a backwards way to teach future reading skills--using the more rare form of the letters! My mom searched high and low to find lower-case magnets for our fridge, but I've never seen any lately.
So my advice is to teach upper and lower at the same time or go rogue and just teach lower-case. They'll get plenty of exposure to upper-case everywhere else. :-) Maybe doing both at once will be boredom prevention.
This may mean, of course, that when someone shows them an upper-case "G" for Garrett, they might not label it correctly at first but, geez, they're two.
Keep rockin' on, Mama!
Melissa and Doug makes a magnet set with both Upper and lower case. You can get it at amazon or a good toy store. My son (27 months) knows all his uppercase, we are now starting on lowercase. He seems to be doing OK but I wish I had done them together.
Hi!
Visiting you from Tot School!
I found a Montessori site that gives recommendations for teaching the letters out of alphabet order. The first few weeks are C, M, A, T and then you move on from there. If you're interested in more, you can email me at booklover1212@yahoo.com and I can send you the rest (I just don't have it easily at my fingertips at the moment!)
Looking forward to reading more!
Post a Comment