What Is Tot School, see post ‘Tot School’ . How/Why I started the Curriculum below, see post “17th Week“.

This was what Darius learnt at 18months Wk 3. The 20th Week Since This Started.

Date: 01 Feb 2010 – 07 Feb 2010

Theme of the Week, Lesson 3 : Jungle

I’m no longer following the Letter of The Week Curriculum in sequence but I’m still using her book/theme recommendations and text like poems and Nursery Rhymes. I’m picking themes that I feel he should know or he has some ‘feel’ for to delve deeper. I’m liking this Theme System because it’s very light. Only 1 subject per day and yet he still managed to learn something from it or do some craft work systematically. In the past, we just do craft as and when. No organisation.

• Word: Vines | Shape: Circle | Letter: C | Number: 3 | Nursery Rhyme: I Had A Little Nut Tree
  

Read on for details below: Long Post With Photos Ahead

First, I had to find info on what is a Jungle and what animals live in it? What is the difference between Jungle and Forest? The info (read more here): Jungle is a type of forest, especially part of a Tropical RainForest. The undergrowth is dense and impenetrable. While sourcing for images online, I noticed they always include a Male Lion, a Giraffe and a Zebra in a Jungle environment.(see ‘Here’) I do not remember seeing them in dense forest undergrowth in real pictures.

Hence I went to do a google search to make sure I do not teach the wrong stuff  to Darius and true enough, Giraffes DO not live in Tropical rainforest. They live in dry open woodlands- savanna, and deciduous forests. Zebras too belong more to Africa. And one wouldn’t find a Lion in a Jungle too! They are mistakenly named as ‘King of the Jungle’ and is still depicted as an animal in a Jungle in various children’s books or materials….So untrue. Lions are found in Africa, Asiatic Lions in India conservation park and mostly in open grasslands (more info). They certainly wouldn’t live in dense forests.

The only ‘Lion’ that lives in a forest is a Cougar which is also commonly known as the ‘Mountain Lion‘. I got to know this creature due to reading ‘Twilight’..(Edward’s fav ‘food’). It is a smaller cat than the Jaguar and a competitor because they hunt on the same prey. So there, the facts all sorted out. I had to edit Katrina’s poem because there’s no Giraffe but I left the lion because of the Mountain Lion. The picture I used for the poem had a Zebra though because I can’t find other suitable ones. I ended up learning a lot myself while preparing materials..^_~)

So the Lesson 3 – Jungle Went Like this:

Monday: Theme -Jungle, Vocabulary Word- Vineswas introduced using pictures, a song, a storybook, a poem. Show him the laminated picture of a Jungle and read the word to him with my fingers pointing from left to right. Gave him the picture of the Vines and read the word to him. Told him ‘Vines are plants with long bendable stems that climb up trees’.

This time, he took the picture too and stuck it on the board himself, a bit lopsided and giggling as he was doing it. Not sure why he found it so funny to stick something up. ^^

The Storybooks Read: 1) You Can Count in the Jungle by David Brooks 2) Over in the Jungle: A Rainforest Rhyme by Marianne Berkes

We read ‘You can count in the Jungle’. He likes this book a lot. When he was flipping through by himself, he would turned to the page with four Jaguars, looked up at me and said, “Four”. Then, he would listened attentively when I read to him and counted each animals from 1 to the Number specified on the page. He also always say “Seh…” for seven. And he is beginning to like the number Ten too.

‘Over in the Jungle- A rainforest rhyme‘ was rhythmic to read but a little tiring as we went through from one lengthy number rhyme to another. But it had a beat to it and thus reading it seemed more lively to Darius and it caught his attention. He was pointing to the pictures too. And he also says, “four, seven, nine and ten” after I read. (They are written in words but there’s a watermarked number symbol on the bottom left)

What he learnt: He didn’t manage to catch the word Jungle to pronounce but he caught some bits of ‘Tiger’ and pronounced it as “Ah..der”., ‘Jaguar’ as “Wu..wua!” (youtube video in this post) He knows that we are studying the word Jungle as his head turned immediately to the word on the sticky board when I pointed out the word Jungle on his song sheet, comparing between the two. He also started saying “A Piece” from the song, “A Piece of Jungle” because I played it for him daily.

Saying ‘A Piece’ (the bg music was “Crocodile Tears” though)

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Saying ‘Tiger’

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Poem-Walking through the Jungle: He sat quietly and listened to me voicing it out as I showed him the figurines, Elephant, Tiger, Gorilla when each animal was mentioned in the text.

Song-1) A Piece of Jungle (main) 2) I Went to the Jungle One day 3) Monkey. I found this book, ‘Piece of Jungle’ by Sarah Weeks from searching the subject Jungle and it was really a great find. Not only was the song appropriate for this topic, it was very nice too. Her songs had a Disney feel to it and her voice sounded like a Disney character singing her love songs. Even Darius like the song after I played it for a while and started chanting, “A Piece” unexpectedly when I was filming him. Her Website where you can hear samples of her music. (scroll to ‘Picture Books With Music’)

For Song 2, he could follow the song when after I sang about the Monkey, “Oh oh oh”, he went “Oh oh oh” himself. Then, he would do a snake hiss too when I began singing the third verse, going “Sssss”. After that, everytime he sees a Monkey like creature (even a gorilla), he would go “oh oh oh oh!” in a high-pitched voice. Funny.

Something NEW:I made this Jungle animal cards stick-ons during mid-week as I found it easier to talk about the Jungle if we have something concrete in front of us.

I happened to see this cartoon picture of the Jungle and found it perfect for my ‘game’. I inserted the name of Trees, Vines into the picture. I googled the Animal images, edited them in Photoshop with the names, printed and laminated them into cards. The picture of the jungle was laminated too and a piece of velcro was stuck onto the area just above the sentence I wrote, “A Jungle has……….”. Small pieces of velcro was also added to the back of each card so they could be stuck onto the laminated Jungle picture when I’m talking about the animal.

In Action: I started with “A Jungle has Trees“, “A Jungle has vines“. Then took one picture card, give it to Darius to try to stick onto the board and say, “A Jungle has a Jaguar…a Tiger…” so on. He was more interested in that blue piece of velcro though and he would take each card turned to the back of it to look at the piece before sticking onto the picture. I also let him remove the card but it was rather sticky and needed more effort so I helped him remove most of the time while he helped stick them on. How Big is it? Look at the Title Picture at the beginning of this post where he’s holding it.

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Tuesday: Shape-Circle was introduced. We didn’t do ‘find the circle’ things in the house for this. I only showed him that the coloured bowls are circular and traced it with a pencil to show him the circles on the paper. Then, I let him use the Do-A-Dot markers to dot circles in the Big circles. He likes the dotting activity and kept laughing while I went “Dot dot dot.”

He started saying “Circle” as “Ser…Ser” near the end of the week. He noticed round things around the house always but funnily, he would say them as “A Ball”. He thought all round things are “Ball”. Like, when I took a CD out, he would say, “A Ball” and I had to correct him and tell him, “no, that is not!”

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Wednesday: Letter C was introduced. This time I printed out a Huge C on a 160gsm paper and did a Collage activity where I tore green crepe paper into small bits for him to stick onto the Letter C. First, I placed some white craft glue on it by guiding his hand holding the bottle. Then, I passed him the bits of paper and he pressed down on it. I had to help him but I tried to let him stick them down himself. I asked him what the letter was and his answer was, “Ssss……” or “Seh…….”. Just not accurately the name of C.

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Thursday: Number 3 was introduced. This time I decided to draw cartoon tigers, print them and laminate so he can do some matching activity and sequencing. I got the idea from one of the websites on homeschool about putting the number on the body of a cartoon object. Unfortunately, I didn’t drew it by considering that I’ll have to cut twice and had difficulty cutting at some corners (like between the legs). Next time, I’ll draw it more simply and make sure there are no ‘corners’. Alas, despite me doing this tiring work in the wee hours of the morning and making it interesting for him, he kept trying to ‘run’ away when I start the activity. Not sure what he was so stressed about as always. Whenever I tell him to match something, he starts running away.

He only listened when I showed him how to place the tigers in sequence, “1 tiger, 2 tigers, 3 tigers” and helped him to move his hand to lay them down. He did understand to place the tigers down though and would get them correct sometimes if he is concentrating enough. BUT most of the time, he just wants to run and quickly put them down at the wrong place right in the middle without thinking. We did this for three days as I started in advance on Wednesday and continued to Friday. At the end of the lesson, he still did not know how to say “Three” in both Language. In Mandarin, he would say, “Yi, Er…”and jump to “4″. But at least, he understood 3 comes after 2 and before 4.

Besides this, we also did the usual sticker on the piece of paper with Number 3 hand-drawn. I let him held the marker and moved his hand to draw 3 and he found it funny and laughed. He still has difficulty in pasting the dot stickers where it always end up sticking onto his index finger but he doesn’t give up and would use his other hand to try to press down. In the end, I still had to help him with it.

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Friday: Nursery Rhyme- I Had a Little Nut Tree was introduced. Just a recital of the rhyme so he knows that there are different kind of ways English can be written- in a poem, in a rhyme, in a story, in a song.

Reviews: On each day, we did reviews of the lesson we went through the day before. Therefore on Friday, I went through all the items with him on the board.

Friday: No craft this week. Didn’t manage to work on a craft this week as I was busy with other stuff. But the craft intended was to draw a favourite animal on a construction paper. Then, cut out strips of green construction papers to act as “grass”. Get him to stick the grass over and around the animal so that it is covered behind the grass. I was thinking, trees or vine-like structures would be more appropriate since it’s a dense forest.

OVERALL, THE LEARNING CORNER & BOARD

So that’s all to the Theme-Based Learning. Only take a few minutes to go through and the items are stuck onto the board for a week til the same day next week, they are replaced with a different item under the same heading. E.g. A is replaced with letter B, Square is coloured with the colour learnt the following week. So whenever he walked into the room, he would see this board and remembered what we have learnt.

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I printed these bears from a Homeschooling site for him to do matching of the shapes as we were studying Circle this week. We also revised Square. He also wanted to ‘run’ away when we do this activity.
Skills learnt: Matching identical items.

His version of Jaguar is "Wuah! Wuah! Wuah!"

At the beginning of the week, I took out these Safari Animal figurines I specially bought over the weekend for the Jungle theme and laid them out on a grassland map provided. Just when I thought he would play with them, he proceeded to put the figurines back into the box to ‘keep’ them. Haha. I introduced him to all the animals and he was very interested in the Giraffe as it is seldom shown in pictures in storybooks. However, since Giraffes are not found in Jungles, I kept it and only left the Elephant, Tiger, Jaguar and Gorilla out for him on the mat. They proved very useful later when he took the figurines of Tiger and Jaguar throughout the week and kept telling me their ‘names’ to get my attention. He even brought the Jaguar into the bedroom. Strangely, it was made as the biggest animal figurine out of all the animals. The Tiger is second to it and even the lion is smaller than it. There’s also caveman figurines and a horse. He would take the horse and say, “Hah…hah….ssss”.
Skills learnt: Pretend play

Played with the Magnets in many colours using the Magnets on the Move-Colours book I bought. The magnets are really cute that even both of us like them. He doesn’t know how to stick them onto the correct shape yet but we will keep working on it when we have time. Alas, we can’t leave him with it though because the first thing he did when we accidentally left the book there, was to take one magnet and bend it!
Skills learnt: Magnetism & Colour Differentiation

English Books: It’s the Bear! By Jez Alborough.
He loves this BIG book and would keep flipping it. I also enjoyed reading it to him with animated voices, “It’s THE BEAR!”, “Help!!” He learned to do a little ’scream’ of his own too when we reached the page.

He loves to read! or flip? This was taken when he immediately came in and sat down to look at the book right after his bath.

Chinese Books: 最好吃的蛋糕 （Dolphin Media Set of 15books), 咦？那是什么？(Pelangi Books Rainbow Reader), 我和他 (still reading)， Bk1 – 拍球 from the set I got from Odonata Publishing.

Weekend: Nothing special over the weekend as we planned to go Outing only on Monday.

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