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

(This post is ‘overdue’. Hadn’t had time to do a write-up. Luckily, I had the pictures to remind me of what we did!)

This was what Darius learnt at 18months Wk 4. The 21st Week Since This Started.

Date: 08 Feb 2010 – 14 Feb 2010

Theme of the Week, Lesson 4 : Hand

A simple theme this week. I had organised my curriculum for him into at least 8 categories and focusing on one subject out of each per week, rotating them when the eighth is reached. The categories are ‘Farm Animals’, ‘Transportation’,'Habitat/Environments’,'Body Parts’, ‘Object’, ‘Nature’, ‘Insect’, ‘Human/Relationship’. Whether I would really follow the planned themes would depend though on his current interest that week. I may switch up certain themes or changed it if the materials are not sufficient.

This week was the category, ‘Body Parts’ and I chose ‘Hand’ because he already knew how to read ‘eye’. Ears, nose and mouth aren’t enough to stand alone as a topic.

• Word: Fingers| Colour: Blue | Letter: D | Number: 5 | Nursery Rhyme: Lavender’s Blue
  

Read on for details below: Long Post With Photos Ahead

So the Lesson 4 – Hand Went Like this:

Monday: Theme -Hand, Vocabulary Word- Fingers was introduced using pictures, a song, a storybook, a poem. I photographed his hands (see picture above), cropped one hand out and printed it with the word, ‘Hand’. I thought instead of just using any hand from the internet sites, he would relate better seeing his own hand. I also took a close-up picture of his fingers and printed them with the word, ‘Fingers’.

He likes the Hand picture and kept peeling it off throughout the week and stuck it on again. The printed ‘Hand’ is almost the same size as his real hand coincidentally so it’s funny to see his hands beside it. Hope the board would continue to remain sticky despite him ‘abusing’ it. Already, some papers are dropping off from it the moment I stuck them on.

The Storybooks Read: 1) Hands (Rookie Readers) by Dana Meachen Rau 2) Here Are My Hands by Bill Martin Jr and John Archambault

It was not easy finding books on the topic, ‘Hands’. I had to made do with these books and it didn’t excite him as much as the previous weeks.Though the topic is quite weak, I still feel we should do it so he have an idea of Body Parts. ‘Hands’ was easy to read and appropriate because it has “Hands can…make,bake,wrap..etc.” on every page. ‘Here are my Hands’ talked of many body parts,starting from the head and ending with the skin, not only hands. After reading it for two days, he started following the actions in the book. E.g. He would put his hands on top of his head, when the sentence was talking about head. Then, move his hands or touch his face. Very unexpected of him.

What he learnt: He loves the letter H so for the whole week, looking at the word,’Hand’, he only said, “Hah hah…hah hah”. I tried pronouncing Hand for him several times but he did not get it. But at least when I said, “Hand”, he did know I was referring to the hand by looking at it.

Poem-My Hand: I found this poem while searching about Hands and got the notion to ask him to do a handprint so I can preserve it. If not for this theme, I would never have asked him to do the handprint because I hadn’t thought of it. Now I got a 18.5months old handprint laminated forever. ^_^

Song-Helping Hand.After I first started searching for songs in Youtube for his lessons, Youtube is now my greatest resource. I found this song from a Christian organisation very nice to listen to and introduced it to him.

I typed the lyrics out and laminated for him. He didn’t get excited but he enjoyed listening to it and always want to sit on my lap while I’m using the computer so I can switch on Youtube for him. We often end up viewing the current theme song, plus the previous theme songs, the Toot Toot Chuggle Chuggle by Wiggles and several other favourites from The Wiggles and it could go on for sometime.

Tuesday: Colour- Blue was introduced. Put on a Blue Top for him. Again, the Do-A-Dot markers were very useful. We dotted the circle shape we learnt last week, taking the opportunity to recap with him. And looked at objects in blue from storybooks or things lying around us. He knows Blue already, in fact it was the first colour he knew. But I still feel the need to introduce again to make sure. When I showed him, he was able to say, “bue”.

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Wednesday: Letter D was introduced. Again I printed Letter D out on a piece of 160gsm paper. I also printed the smaller letter d because they looked different. He pronounced D as “Tt Tt”. Not exactly accurate. But he makes the same sound for both big and small D showing that he knew that he recognised upper-case and lower-case.

For Big D, I drew and cut out several circles one by one. Wished I have a circle punch! I then put glue on each of them and asked Darius to paste them into the outline of the D. He got fussy after sometime and started whining a little but I still made him finished the whole thing. He disliked the glue gathering on his fingers.

For Little d, we just Do-A-Dot on them since he was tired of the pasting.

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Thursday: Number 5 was introduced. As usual, I took hold of his hand and wrote two fives on the paper. He enjoyed that. We also pasted 5 stickers each, counting them again.

I had a ‘Counting Book’ made but did not post about it in my previous post. It’s just simple printing out numbers 1-25 plus 100, paste them at the top of each cut-out piece of cardstock (double-sided) and laminate them. After that, punch holes using a paper template placed on top of the cards to make sure the holes are aligned. Then, slip binder rings through them. Every week, when we learnt a new number, we would paste the dots onto the laminated cards and then do a ‘recap’, starting from 1 to the current number. He can see that the number of dots on it has increased.

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Friday: Nursery Rhyme- Lavender’s Blue 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.

OVERALL, THE LEARNING CORNER & BOARD

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I didn’t do any other planned activities this week with him. I was working on personal stuff.

English Books: 1) Hello, Day!By Anita Lobel. 2)  Peter Rabbit’s Colours (Peter Rabbit Seedlings) by Beatrix Potter

He learnt about the different sounds that animals make to represent Good Morning. The illustrations are good and the wordings are big enough to catch his interest. He flipped through this book the most throughout the week. The Peter Rabbit’s book is too lengthy for him with many flaps to lift to reveal parts of clothings that are of the colours. By the time we got to the middle, he was already feeling bored.

Chinese Books: 最好吃的蛋糕 （Dolphin Media Set of 15books)

Weekend: Was the CNY celebration during the weekend. Had fun exploring the airport and River HongBao.

We were walking along when I saw this reflective convex mirror for cars turning in and took a picture of our reflection. He had been laughing at the cars appearing out of a bend. Still kept laughing non-stop at himself. Oops…I just realised this…was I blocking those cars from viewing it?

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