Simple as abc ...

I spy & I hear with my little ear something beginning with

 'a' & 'e'

I haven't posted recently about 'home schooling' - thats not to say that its not occurring, I just haven't recorded it.

So our little game is to name 2 phonics a week, we say the sound then search through our little tub of letters to find the sound/letter, we practice writing them and then we spy items/objects that begin with that sound.

On this week we found:

album, elephant, egg cup, ambulance, amphibious vehicle, egg, apple, ant (flying!) and finally animal.

Set a time limit to add a challenge.  Pop your treasures on a shelf.

To make them think on it a bit more we then have a think about what jobs you can do that start with your letters/sounds: best this week were acrobat & explorer, we also had ambulance driver, astronaut, engineer ... 

You can also think of body parts that start with the letter/sound.

In the meantime I put the high frequency words around the room just so we are familiar with how they look.

Back to the paper to draw a few of the items/jobs/body parts we've talked about and a bit more practice of our letters!

Honest to goodness fun with a bit of learning thrown in.

As it breaks into 5 chunks it doesn't get boring, Loopy's attention span is around 10-15mins of full on attention, after that she wanders a little so it works well for us.  She has something tangible at the end of it in her work and the items on the shelf.

Numeracy

Keeping it simple, we use day to day things for our numeracy and find numbers in almost everything.  This makes playing very simple games with Loopy easy & fun.  A favourite is to throw 2 or 3 dice and add up the sides, keep a score and the one with either the highest or lowest score wins.  We throw around 10 times for each game, again perfect timing for attention spans here.

Rightly or wrongly we're concentrating on phonics at the moment, lots of stories help, endless sound spotting in day to day things.  

It feels like the balance is right, its mainly play still, but there is evidence now at least 'work' being done.  Just because it is 'work' it doesn't have to stop being fun.

As its Spring there will be lots for us to look at in the natural world, lots of amazing changes.  Tadpoles, Lambing, Bulbs to name just a few.

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