Autumn with K

K seems to be growing up so fast – I really should be posting more than I do. Her speech is slowly developing and she is answering yes/no questions by nodding her shaking her head rather violently. She loves pulling L’s clothes out her cupboard and climbing into her toy box and physically she is getting more and more active.

Running with her sister.

Having fun on the swings

She does Little Reader usually once a day and joins L for any hands on activities – anything else she grabs whatever she can and runs off with it or tries to scribble with anything she can write with.

She is still showing a lot if interest in books and is starting to recognise quite a few pictures in the books she looks at and will point to them.

Today we looked at all the autumn leaves and the children sat in a huge pile of leaves we have in the back garden. K seemed to like playing in them.

She likes to copy her big sister in almost anything which makes getting her to brush her teeth much easier but she also wants to use adult forks and of course koki pens are far more exciting than crayons.

Painting her own turtle.

K hears more counting than L did at this age because I often use the swinging time to count to L – we do skip counting and couting to big numbers so it is natural to count to K also. Here she is on the staors counting biscuits (which did not get eaten!)

More math – playing with dominos

A farewell wave from K.

Homeschooling activities

I have been working more than usual lately and so homeschooling has had to go on in a more limited fashion. L’s reading is coming on nicely – she finished book 10a of the Ladybird Keyword reading series and has since read Peter’s Good Idea which was a shortish story with more challenging vocabulary. She still needs some help with sounding out new words though if expected to do it she almost always gets it right – I think it is just a case of practice now. She seems to remember any word she sees only once however so I will have to keep giving her new words for her to practice sounding them out.

We have been continuing to read the Usborne Children’s Encyclopedia and have covered a variety of animal groups. We made a picture of a turtle with sand and leaves to imitate the shell and scaly skin. Doing this with an enthusiastic one year old however was quite a challenge.

L’s turtle

Helping her sister finish her own turtle

I have been reading a large number of chapter books to L since getting a card at a much better library than the one closest to us – its a long trip out there to get books but every time I do get there I am so glad I went. She is enjoying Dick King-Smith’s books at the moment and luckily he writes enough that it will take some time to get through them. She is also enjoying Ramona stories (Beverley Cleary) and enjoyed watching the Ramona and Beezus movie too.

We have not done much writing recently as I need to organise some copywork for her and decide where to go from here – she seems to need more exciting sentences than we have been doing and also seems to want them related to exciting reading sections which means more work for me. I will have to make some decisions about this in the near future.

Maths has also been a bit of a concern for me lately. She is resisting Horizons a bit and seems distractable so I put that on hold. We moved forward with MEP but lately it seems too easy for her as they are drilling early addition facts and she knows them and does not even seem to need to think to answer them anymore so I need to decide what to do about maths too. I may return to Singapore for a while as we started a new section and she seemed more interested in that. I also think she just needs a bit of a change in presentation to get her interested.

Other than that we have been having fun just playing around – getting outside a lot more now that the weather is a little cooler, playing plenty of pretend games and having endless tea parties. L has a wonderful imagination and loves putting on plays and making up games – I think she just wishes her mother and sister would oblige her more and do as she says.

Digging up stones

One of many pretend games with soft toys

K the last two months

My camera is working again and I have been taking a few photos after a long rest – I found it was disturbing our time together so I am trying to find a better balance now but I have a feeling I will never quite get a true balance. So here is an update on K in the last two months.

Physical Development:
K is walking well and very quickly and attempting to run. She climbs on chairs, rides motorbikes and likes swinging on both our swings (not just the baby one). She is enjoying climbing on jungle gyms and had a wonderful time at Wyndford keeping me on my toes by trying to climb high jungle gyms by herself and prevent me from catching her. She was too scared of the horses for me to get her on one even for a quick photo and shoved the bunnies out the way when the sniffed at her, but she loves cats even though one of our house cats scratches her if K tries to pat her. She loves playing peek-a-boo and finding items we hide under blankets or anything else for her to find.

Social:
K is still not happy when I leave her with anyone though she does eventually settle down. She knows the routine in our house and yells “Dadda” when she hears the gate opening in the evening. She always comes running to greet me when I get home from work the days I am out. She was enjoying Moms and Tots group activities more recently though that is closed until schools start again in the next week or two. She is also starting to notice babies and children more now and is fascinated watching them. She watches more than touches though and is very visual (even if you show her an ordinary item she will observe it well first before touching it which is quite unlike her sister.)

Communication:
K is understanding almost everything we say now. She will fetch things for me when I ask, points to things to get them and looks at whatever it is we are talking about. She is saying very few words though I have heard “kitty,” “hello,” “mama” and “dadda” and she is making animal noises a lot lately. She is starting to realise that the pictures in books are referring to real objects and if she sees a picture of an animal she will make the sound the animal makes, but she does get more excited seeing the real thing of course. The other night she woke at 03:00am and insisted there was a light on outside the curtain in the neighbours house. It took some persuading to get her back to sleep again! We are still using Little Reader with her though not as regularly as I would like. She likes word flash cards even more than her sister did and gets very excited when it is a word she understands. I showed her the word “tummy” the other night and she lifted her shirt and rubbed her tummy though this is a word I have seldom said around her. She is showing increased interest in stories now and will listen to most of a book now (though often she gets distracted bringing me the next one before the first is finished) – she is always around when I read to L so is hearing a lot of stories second hand too.

Fine motor:
K has quite good motor control. She loves to draw and whenever I am working with L she gets herself busy taking lids off kokis and drawing on her own paper (and often on L’s paper which frustrates her sister).

“Schooling”
K is around for every activity I do with L so I try to include her when possible and she loves the outdoor activities. Since L learns to count in 10s while being pushed on the swing often, I usually count in 1s for K beforehand – she’ll probably learn them both simultaneously that way. We do have quite a lot of fights since K is so into everything and L wants her things to be left alone, but mostly it works out alright and I can give K her own activities to a certain extent. K likes animals though not as much as her sister did at the same age but will spend time outside patting them during “school time.” She is also enjoying outings more now and had a lovely time at Irene Dairy Farm recently – she was thoroughly interested in the calves and didn’t want to leave.

Learning about trees with L

I’d climb in with the cows if I could.

Favourite activities:
K is still unpacking everything all the time – any cupboard or bookshelf is easy pickings for her. She is actually very good about packing away however provided someone is there helping her. Helping with anything is still fun be it mopping or sweeping the floor or washing the car! And playing peek-a-boo or running away when Mom says 1-2-3 is always fun.

The last two months with L

I haven’t been very good with my camera in the last two months which is partly why I haven’t updated this blog and then when I did decide to it took quite a bit to get the camera to download the photos. (and they were supposed to be downloading automatically so I am not sure what was happening there) They are finally on my computer and so I thought I had better do a quick update with highlights of what we have been doing.

Language Arts:
I have been giving L choices of books for shared reading – she still seems most comfortable with the levelled readers so we are now tackling Ladybird Key Words book 10a though we have also read some other shorter books – Androcles and the Lion, The Ugly Duckling and a few others inbetween. Her stamina has increased and she will read short books aloud to her sister in the car occassionally. We have done a tiny bit of spelling though I am not worrying about this yet as she is still just copying things for handwriting practice – she has learnt all the small letter formations and a fair number of the capital letters too and is copying a sentence a day. Every now and then (when she asks) we do Read, Think and Do – part of picture is given to her and then the instructions which she reads independently tell her what to add to the picture and what to colour. I have introduced this to get her colouring a bit and also to follow instructions since most commonly I hear: Why must we do it blue? Why not pink? – and the only reason is because it says so – I do not care if she colours it pink but if she starts school next year she needs to be able to follow pointless instructions.

Math:
We have been continuing cycling three math programmes – Horizons K, Singapore 1 and MEP 1 – we do one or two a day depending on how much time we have and whether she is in the mood. She is counting in 10s and has since shown an interest in higher numbers so we have counted in tens and hundreds and thousands (etc) all the way to a million and beyond. Her favourite programme is MEP – she seems to like the problem solving and also it uses smaller numbers which gets her competent with these first and I like that it is free!

Science:
We do not have a formal science programme – I read to her often from Usborne Children’s Encyclopedia and if we read something that really interests her we look it up further. We were also “studying” some wild animals which she choose to learn about and doing some related art activities. We have started talking about science experiments and how to set one up – we decided to try to see whether grass could be used as a natural colourant for smarties (she wanted to study smarties in school when asked: “Because then we can buy some and eat them” – she decided that grass probably wasn’t a good idea cause it would go brown – it took a lot longer than we thought it would to become brown and because it was in glass jars she found it fascinating that water formed in the jars. We will probably try a few more science experiments in the near future. We also learnt about rings in trees when they cut down a dead tree in our back garden.

Hand milking cows

History: I am reading her The Story of the World Volume 1 (Ancient History) but very slowly and only when she asks for it. We have built a “Nile River” out of mud in the back garden (and added in some geography about hills and ricers), made playdough tablets and wrote both cuneiform and hieroglyphics on them (and then turned them into cupcakes), visited the rock paintings at Wyndford Farm, read a lot about mummies which really fascinated her and also looked at numerous pictures of pyramids and spoke about all the treasure they hoarded with the pharoahs. We try to take library books out before covering a section as she likes to see it in lots of pictures.

Writing in playdough

Geography: we have not done much of this besides talk about certain countries when they come up in novels we are reading or when we speak about animals that live in different areas.

Play: I try to get L outside as much as possible especially now as the weather cools down a bit. We made musical instruments out of bark and played them outside. She has been playing a lot of Indians and Cowboys after reading about children playing these games in various books she read and I read to her. We have played endless animal games, princess games and follow the leader games.

Social: Art class has finished and I am not sending her back next term because she didn’t want to leave me and it became too stressful. She has been to play with a few friends and on our holiday played with a lot of new friends – in fact she ran off with them alone a fair amount of the time and it was nice that she could safely be so independent. She also goes to The Urban Market once a month and plays with many children there – Clmaber Club brings its equipment and she loves playing on the aparatus. We also took the children to the Irene Dairy Market where they really enjoyed seeing the calves.

Waiting in line to get her face painted at the Urban Market

The fierce tiger

Holiday Time: We took the whole family to Wyndford Farm at the end of March and it was lovely. L played with a lot of children, went on a zip line all by herself twice, rode horses, went on a few walks where she did very well, went to see the rock paintings and played to her hearts content. It was lovely to get away for a short time. On the way to the farm we stopped at a game reserve and L liked seeing a lot of wild animals there. She also spent a lot of time playing with the bunnies and feeding them.

Weekly Wrap Up

I did not take any photos this last week so you will have to excuse the photoless post and because of this I decided just to post a weekly wrap up for both my girls.

This week I spent reading many books to L because we had a few arrive in the post and of course neither of us wanted to wait to read them. We read: The Runaway Pancake, Androcles and the Lion, Rumpelstiltskin, Stories of Dogs, Hill of Fire, The Chalkbox Kid, East of the Sun west of the Moon, Nate the Great, Sarah’s Story, This is my Book, Owl Babies and many more that I cannot remember now without raiding her room while she is sleeping and I would rather let her sleep!

L herself read a lot of The Runaway Pancake and Androcles and the Lion as well as reading more of The Beginner’s Bible. We continued with phonics though I have taught her some phonics that we have yet to reach in the book I am using simply because she was starting to ask to spell words that used rules she has not come to yet. So she covered the long O sound (we must still do OE, but we did OW and OA), the AR sound and OY and OI.

For Math we took a break from Singapore and started MEP Level 1. She has had no problem with this so far, but I will probably take it slowly and alternate with Singapore 1a. She has also showed more interest in counting to 100 now and also in recognising bigger numbers – if I call a number on the 100 chart she can usually find it, but does struggle to read some of the higher numbers herself. She found a huge snakes and ladders game I had forgotten we had and played with the numbers on there so I may take it out again at some stage while she is still learning the numerals.

We continued with some writing from book 2c of Ladybird Key Words, but towards the end of the week I also got her to write with her whole arm – apparently this helps children write more fluently later and with L being so hands on she actually enjoyed this more than having a pencil in her hand.

L and I have been reading The Usborne Internet Linked Encyclopedia in the evenings doing a page or two a day and she enjoys this. We discussed planet earth and night and day recently and she spent the time spinning balls in the light from her bedroom bulb.

K has given up on walking for now and will stand for ages but will no longer take anymore steps though she was taking quite a few earlier. I guess she just wants to do things in her own time. She had fun putting bottle caps into different containers this week. She is showing more interest in books and listening to stories again now and loves paging through books. She also appears to be understanding more now and will respond to a few commands (some of the time). L was away at her Nana’s house til Tuesday this week and K missed her – in fact they both missed each other quite a lot.

Tot School: Weekly Wrap Up

K is 11.5 months old.

K has not really wanted to play much with toys this week – she is taking her first steps and getting better everyday so doesn’t have time to sit still and play. Most of her week she spent opening every cupboard she could manage to open and emptying the contents onto the floor – now if only I could teach her to pack it all back up again. I have still not been able to get any pictures or video of her walking though – she is not using the cart as much anymore as she was but its the only photo I have.

She enjoyed looking at herself in the mirror quite often and we are still working on body part vocabulary so this worked well for her. I have also stuck up two reading cards “eyes” and “foot” and whenever we pass them I read them to her and point to those parts of her body – she loves it and is most disappointed if I walk past without showing her.

She found a bottle in a cupboard this week and while she only ever uses sippy cups she showed a lot of interest in this bottle so I cleaned it out and put some water in it for her and she played with it for quite some time – she did eventually drink from it, but also spent a lot of time letting the water splash around in it.

I put her blocks into a small bag and she had a lot of fun taking them out of the bag and building small towers with them. She is starting to get frustrated though when she tries to stack three and the whole tower falls down – then she throws the blocks behind her in disgust.

The Moms and Tots group I take both girls to on Fridays has suddenly got far more babies than toddelrs in it, so they are trying to set up safe places for the babies and activities for them to do during the toddler craft and exercise time. K enjoyed being there and was quite happy spending her time looking in mirrors and looking at books.

Moments to Remember

I didn’t take many photos this week and yet we had quite an enjoyable week most of the time. For me the special times still remain when my two girls are playing together as I know if they were in school they would be separated inot their ages and not see as much of each other. L continues to be very protective and caring of her sister and K really smiles whenever she sees her sister first thing in the morning.

Letting L decide

Last week L and I had a few fights about school and just life in general and so I decided this week to step back a bit and let her have some fun. We would still continue with phonics and reading daily and do writing and math at least a few days this week. The rest of what we did would be up to L with a few suggestions from Mom if she needed any – she didn’t.

So this week she asked to do a treasure hunt so I made some clues for her and made a treasure chest of an ice cream box with a few edibles in it and some toys. Despite me using fairly difficult words in the clues on purpose to stretch her reading and phonics she insisted on doing it independently and found the treasure all by herself. She also decided to make some puppets out of straws and cut out color in pages and put on a puppet show for me and K.

She did quite a bit of swimming this week and we also did exercises in the garden and played with her sister in the sandpit at the church. She asked to have a few tea parties and played quite a few computer games. She also spent some time typing to her Dad on Skype while he was at work – also totally independently and she is now trying to spell some words so that she can type more than just a string of letters to him. Later in the week she was asking me to spell certain words for her on google so she could find games to play on the computer – I will definitely have to keep a close watch on the computer now and what she is getting into.

She wanted to go shopping a few times so we went out to buy K a birthday present. She also wanted to dress up as a unicorn and was quite insistent about what needed to be done to make a costume – she wanted to paint a costume and use a particular toy of hers as a horn. She was even quite insistent about where the paper must be left to dry.

She built houses for her soft toys to sleep in, told me which books she wanted read to her and told me she wanted to do some schooling about Pirates – the day after she told me this I found the Jake and the Neverland Pirate printables on www.1plus1plus1equals1.blogspot.com and she was so happy with these and spent some time playing a memory game as well as writing all the characters names with some help from her Mom. She also enjoyed painting some of the sheets before we cut them out.

We carried on with Singapore Math this week. We are also using Book 1c of Ladybird for writing and also early grammar – we used flashcards to work out sentence order, wrote out the missing words (she is not ready to write long pieces as she is still learning her letters so I stick to one word at a time) For reading she has started reading The Beginner’s Bible and we do one story a day. I am reading the book to her first so we are about 10 or more stories ahead of where she is reading and this also gives her some confidence. In phonics we covered the long E sound (EE, EA and IE) and started the long I sound (IE and Y)

Today she asked to learn some Afrikaans so I took out some Afrikaans flashcards made for babies and showed her the numbers 1-10 – I will see whether she remains interested in learning it or not as she does have some Afrikaans friends and it would help her if she knew how to speak it a little.

L I think also needed to be little a bit this week – K is starting to walk and we have all been excited about this and today L asked me to pretend that she was doing all sorts of things for the first time too – wanting I imagine her Mom’s excitement. I told her about all the things she had done that I was proud of, but did play her pretend game with her. She also wanted to pretend that she was a baby a bit, so I let her do this too. After doing that she also wanted to pretend to be K’s mother – so here is a photo of her looking after her “baby.”

Tot School: Vocabulary

K is 11.5 months old.

When L was small I spoke to her all the time but with K I find I am still talking to L more and K is hearing far more speech directed to other people. Right now her own understanding of words is growing rapidly and I feel like she needs me to speak to her about what she is doing and label everything, so I have been using tot school for that – a time to herself to have everything commented on. I did not get too many pictures of what we have been doing though as most of this labelling occurred when I carried her around the house.

We are still reading a lot of books, anywhere and everywhere.

And K has taken to unpacking the bookcase every evening when I am putting L to bed.

She enjoyed exploring the very green slide at a children’s play area this week. L even took her down the slide on her lap but she wasn’t so happy with that.

We introduced counting to three and the colour blue (and all sorts of other numbers and colours too) K thought it was all very tasty.

She is now managing to stack two blocks whether they are foam or plastic or wooden.

She really enjoys the sand in the sandpit at church and will play there for long periods.

And a happy smile just for fun!

Moments to Remember: Two memories

Early in the week L decided that she wanted to have a tea party with K and lots of her soft toys. It was nice to take a break from any scheduled activities and just enjoy each others company.

Another thing I’d like to remember is L’s early attempts at writing – we changed the way I was teaching her writing this week and gave her more independence which has actually resulted in her learning the letter formations better, but her creativity is getting the best of her and our writing lessons right now have to do with a lot more than just writing. While it looks neater when she just traces dots this seems to teach her more and its far more fun to look at afterwards – that is the word ball she wrote there with all its faces.