Age 4-6 - Age 6-8 - Reading - Social Studies

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Age 4-6 Age 6-8 Reading Social Studies - Always Learning

Lightening Fast Japanese for Kids and Families- a preview review

April 13th 2012 13:38

Lightening Fast Japanese by Carolyn Woods

I have always wanted to learn a new language....well, not always - Spanish class in high school did not bring out the best in me - I was more concerned about watching certain someone ..

I passed, two years of Spanish and very little to show for it....

Not my finest moment, anyways, fast forward to today. I have been working through a Rosetta Stone French program simply because I want to read in French - there are several bloggers I follow who I think I would get more out of their information if I could decipher the posts faster.

..............and now, I am working through Lightening Fast Japanese for Kids and Families by Carolyn Woods. The brand new book is structured into games and easy activities that you can do throughout your day to day life with kids. There are conversation starters, treasure hunts, bingo, twister and more to engage kids in learning.

We are only a week into the program and have honestly only completed a few of the "converstations" - I am little hung up on pronunciation....so we've been supplementing with Google

Head over to Carolyn Woods on Facebook,and Twitter and watch this blog for an upcoming giveaway!

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Posted By: Sylvie Branch - Category: Age 3-4, Age 4-6, Age 6-8, Age 9-11, Books, Reading, Social Studies

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Learning Fun with Easter Eggs

April 7th 2012 11:18

Easter is a fun holiday for little ones. Not only is the weather typically warming up around this time of year; people hide colorful plastic eggs full of candy! The annual egg hunt can lead to a variety of interesting learning games. If you do not want to wait, simply gather your collection of plastic eggs and get started today!

Reinforce skills with plastic eggs for preschoolers

Group, sort, and organize the eggs. Teach children how to group using a variety of Easter eggs. Over the years, my plastic egg collection has become quite diverse. We have the traditional colorful plastic eggs in red, yellow, blue and purple as well as the pastel versions, the large, the small and a handful of novelty eggs that are designed to look like sports balls.

Let your child dump the bag and sort into piles. They can sort by color, size or other criteria they determine. Instead of piles some children naturally place eggs in lines. My son was always lining things up, cars, stuffed animals and the eggs.

Color recognition- Hide eggs and have them look for only a certain color. You can put little notes inside to make the impromptu hunt more fun. Red eggs can have a note that says "Red" for example to help your child associate the word with the color.

Number recognition- Put a letter or number inside each egg, and then have the child line up all the number from 1-10 or check off each letter as they find it on a chart.

Reinforce skills with Easter eggs as your child grows

Teach an older child how to make a map with Easter eggs. Let them hide eggs and create a map to each location, or hand them a map that you prepared to lead them to the hidden eggs.

Practice skip counting with eggs or introduce concepts of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Ask questions such as, "How many eggs does everyone get?" "If there are ten eggs hidden and you found seven, how many eggs are left?"

Word pattern reinforcement can be accomplished through playing with Easter eggs. Write a word pattern such as "at" and put it inside an egg. When a child finds that word pattern, they are instructed to write down all the different words that follow that pattern such as; bat, cat, sat, fat and so on.

Review for a test by putting a question in each egg. When a child chooses an egg, they have to open it and answer the question posed. Alternately, place the answers inside the egg and have the child come up with the question. This works especially well with memorizing state capitols.

Easter eggs are an inexpensive way to infuse fun into learning. Be sure to add a little surprise treat from time to time to keep the games more exciting.

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Posted By: Sylvie Branch - Category: Age 3-4, Age 4-6, Age 6-8, Age 9-11, Maths, Reading, Social Studies, Toys

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A is for Always

April 2nd 2011 12:52

For 26 days in April (minus Sundays) I will be posting a blog for each letter of the alphabet.
"Sylvie's word of the day"
I am all for challenges, so when this was dangled in front of me in my writers group, I grabbed it.

Hundreds of people signed up, literally 1037 people. Go ahead, Sign up here, if you dare.

This mini adventure is fairly mundane, but with 1000 bloggers jumping in, stalking each other, chatting away everyday, something good is bound to happen.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Always is my word of the day, in honor of ALWAYS learning. Life is too ....oh wait, I'll just quote Henry Miller, he said it best.....

"develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music, the world is simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself." ~Henry Miller

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Posted By: Sylvie Branch - Category: Age 3-4, Age 4-6, Age 6-8, Age 9-11, Books, Computer Based, Cooking, Craft, DVDs, Maths, Reading, Social Studies, Toys, Writing

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Play With Me

January 25th 2010 18:34

Following on from our animal theme we have been reading the charming book, Play With Me written by Marie Hall Ets. It features a little girl who ventures outside to play with the wild animals only to discover that at first they are too frightened to go near her. The text and pictures are charming in this book and is one of my daughter's favourites.

Homeschool Share provided us with some book related suggestions, the favourite one of my daughter being the Guess Who Animal game.

We stumbled upon a fun birdcage craft and my partner and daughter even built a birdhouse and feeder from a $5 craft pack we discovered in a supermarket.

For the younger children we found a dot painting frog as well as an alphabet dot to dot.

For those that like fingerpainting here were a couple of animal fingerpainting ideas which gave us some inspiration.

For turtle lovers, here is a fun turtle craft as well as an easy turtle to colour.

And let's not forget the paper chain snake.

A book like this provides lots of opportunities for animal spotting, although as it is winter at the moment, our animal spotting is diminished slighly with only some squirrels and a few birds - however better than nothing.

Springtime is a great time of year to visit this story however any time of the year is great to read inspirational stories to your children.

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Posted By: Michelle Sweeney - Category: Age 3-4, Age 4-6, Age 6-8, Books, Craft, Reading, Social Studies

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