Of The Week

Doodle has been displaying a reluctance to practicing writing his letters or any organized writing activity. I'd hoped over the summer he would outgrow this but it's not happened and it has forced me to really look at what could be causing it. He is a bright kid and loves to learn but refuses any suggestions at writing letters or numbers.

After thinking for some time, I stumbled on the thought that maybe his being a very dominant lefty was causing problems in him learning how to manipulate his writing utensil. I paid close attention and sure enough during our days when we came to hand writing he shut down emotionally and refused to try. I did a little research and I found some great sites talking about learn to write left handed and the obstacles that kids face in a right dominant world. This has really made me look hard at my kid and realize that it is so very very important for me to focus on giving him confidence in learning how to write well left handed. I feel so strongly about this, in fact, that I've decided to take this fall semester to focus heavily on learning to write before we jump into much anything else at the kindy level. Despite him being ready for it, so much of the curriculum I'd looked at requires Doodle to write at some point in time. (numbers for math, copy words for learning to read, etc) and if he is not confident in his ability to write he will continue to hold back in learning and refuse to grow.

So what do I do now? I take my neatly organized and planned curriculum and I decide to rearrange it in a way that makes sense on how to teach a kid to write. Again, although Doodle knows his alphabet, I'm working on helping him learn to write it which means we will be focusing time on turning letters into shapes and learning how to create those shapes first with hand held manipulatives and then followed on paper with a writing utensil.

Week 1 - August 30th - September 3rd

Letter - L

• Tracer Page -  Put into a sheet protector Doodle and I will take turns learning how to go through the motions of writing an "L" with fat dry erase markers. The sheet protectors allow us to reuse this page daily by wiping it clean after completed. (Other tracers available here.)
• Lacing L Craft - Part of learning L will also be phonics related and serve for our art time. We will be making collages and coloring letters and talking about the sounds and words that start with the letter/sound/etc.
•  Letter(word) Search - Always looking to encourage focus and logic this will be a fun new activity for us. Doodle will search for the "L"s on his own and then I will work with him to continue and find the words as a whole. Good opportunity to work on sight words with him as well. Likely will repeat 2 or 3 times during the week.
• Lizard Puzzle - 6 piece puzzles for some "fun" computer time. 
• L Book - I'm not sure if we'll use the one here or just make our own but I am enjoying the idea of a week long "Letter Book" project with a new theme each day/page.

Word - The

• Spruce Up Sight Words - While I like the phonics approach over sight words, I do think some sight words are good to learn on their own early on, even if done on a phonics approach. I love the way this site turns them into a craft to introduce the words with in a low key approach. I'll be doing a few weeks of 'review' words to see how Doodle takes to the weekly word format. 
•  Sight word memory match game - I will use flash cards of the words in various informal games to force Doodle to read.

Numbers - 1 & One

• I would really like Doodle to learn to read his number words this year. He's easily recognizing numbers up through 12 so we're going to continue with counting and sequencing through 20 but also go "back" and work on number words as well.
• Puzzles - Gotta love a perfect find!
• Patterns - Doodle hasn't shown a huge understanding of patterns so I'd like to help focus him on a new pattern each week and gradually increase the complexity.

Crafts

• Handprint Lillies