December school

Once a week or so we do a therapeutic drawing activity called form drawing.  Basically it is drawing patterns of straight and/or curved lines.  It is great preparation for handwriting.  Prior to actually drawing the forms on paper, we try to get them into his body by having him walk or run the patterns, or by using various body parts to "draw" them large on the wall or in the air.

 He really got into this one!  He wanted to make many more graduated lines than what were required.  (He realized he accidentally drew this with yellow, so of course he had to go back and redo it with blue chalk.  LOL, he cracks me up!)

 We also try to paint every week or two.  In our first grade, the paintings are all color exercises, set to stories.  This one was a story about squirrels snuggled up in their hollow tree for the winter, the story was intended to highlight the cool blue surrounded by the warm red.  Preston is a fairly meticulous painter--he made five "shapes" to represent five squirrels with the names Preston, Sariah, Dallin, Mom, and Dad.  The other purpose of this painting was for him to practice bring the colors right next to each other without overlapping.  Sariah decided to do this painting exercise with us just for fun.

This was a math activity where he practiced grouping the 24 stars in different ways.  He came up with this one all on his own!

Our main topic for the past several week has been learning the vowels and their sounds.  We did this through a story about The Land of the Singing Sounds, where a wicked witch comes and steals the beautiful singing sounds, without which the people not only cannot sing, but also are cross and angry all the time.  The five angels (AKA the vowels) help return the singing sounds, as well as joy and love, to the land.  The "singing sounds" are the long vowel sounds.  Each angel represents a letter, and her picture has the letter hidden in it.

Preston loved seeing a new angel added to the chalkboard each day.

He also loved enacting the parts of the story as they unfolded each day.  Here he has set up quite an elaborate scene (half of the things he included here don't even have to do with the story...)

And of course he had his trusty bowl of oatmeal for story time!  He can never be without that!

Just finished with a drawing...

In addition to practicing writing all the letters, he drew each angel.  I just love his drawings!  They have so much personality!

Angel O has her arms enfolding someone, as if in a hug.

Angel I is pointing to herself, "I".

Angel E

Angel A holds her hands down and out.

He is really loving all this.  Even though he balks at the idea of having to "do school" (mostly because he hears his older sister do it), once we begin he really loves it.

He was really excited about Angel I because he realized that the capital letter looks just like a Roman Numeral I, which he learned last month.  And then the next day he was even more thrilled for Angel O when he realized that O looks like a zero.  His exact words were, "Angel I was so awesome, but then we got Angel O, and that story was EPIC!"  I about died laughing.

The long vowels were the angels' "heavenly singing sounds", and after Christmas break we will discover the angels' "earthly sounds", AKA the short vowel sounds.