Spell it, Hot hot hot!
Now that Bobbin recognizes all her letters, we've been working on learning how to write them. A few weeks ago we started with the letter 'H'. 'H' for 'Horton', to be precise. We read the book almost every day.
'H' for 'Horton': One line down, another line down, and a line straight across the middle!
It helps if you do the lines with flourish - that makes it much more exciting to want to do. She loves making huge, sweeping, 'H's on her chalkboard and then erasing them with just as much gusto. Almost every picture she brings home these days from school has a bunch of large, skinny, 'H's scrawled all over it.
After a week of 'H' we started learning 'T'. Probably should have done the other way around, if we were going by # of "brush strokes", but she seems to be catching on fast, so don't think it made any difference
'T' for 'Tommy': One line down, and another line across the top!
Next came 'O' for 'Octopus' and 'Oven'. That was easy because she's been drawing circles for a while.
'O' for 'Octopus': One big circle.
So today we practiced putting them together into a word. I wrote each letter next to the other, and then we sounded them out together. Then I erased it and had her write the letters side by side. 'HOT' is officially Bobbin's first written word :-)
She gets that every letter has a sound, but she hasn't quite made all the associations yet. However, she's getting there. Completely on her own, when I asked her for a 'T' word today, she came up with 'Tree'.
We haven't tried tackling lower case yet. Everything we do is upper case. I do point out "small" and "big" versions of each letter from time to time, but currently her recognition is all upper case letters.
She can recognize the words "Mommy" and "Mom" though, in a written sentence, although occasionally she'll interchange them. I showed her how you can turn "Mom" into "Mommy" by adding an "my" at the end. And how it rhymes with "Tommy" and all but one letter are the same. She loves to rhyme - often times in the car on the way to school she'll make up all kinds of words to rhyme with the word she's thinking about.
After we mastered "HOT", I decided to try a new letter, and showed her how to write "D". One line down, and one big bump that starts at the top and goes all the way down to the bottom. She gave it a shot but then became more interested in colouring in the middle of the letter when I finished so we ditched the ABC's altogether and just went all out drawing and colouring in random, oddly-shaped circles :-)
Comments
From a teacher's perspective (just as a point of interest) at the end of Kindergarten level in BC a child is expected to be able to: "print most
Posted by stefanie on May 13, 2008 6:51 PM.letters and simple words". As in MOST. At the end of kindergarten! So Bobbin is well on her way to being head of the class (but we knew that already!). Side note: Sarah- you will be learning all of this jargon soon! Yahoo!