Letter F was fun and Letter T was terrific!

I told Jeremy just today that I hesitantly feel like we have turned a corner with home school. Ivelina is consistently having more good days at school. As with all things during this adjustment phase, I know that we are in a pattern of two steps forward and one step back, so now that I have typed that, we're probably in for some challenging days ahead...ha!

We have daily rewards in place for Ivelina. She basically earns one tiny candy for every school activity she completes with good behavior. Even if she slips into bad behavior during an activity, as long as she listens to our warnings and redirection and regulates herself, she still earns her candy. On top of that, if she has an overall good day at school, I let her watch a Youtube video after school. We also track her daily behavior on a weekly chart, and if she has smiley faces all week long, she gets to play with her baby dolls on Saturday and Sunday. This is a huge incentive for her! All the rewards and encouragement built into her schools days are really helping her stay motivated to learn. Consequently, we have seen huge improvements in her school work. We don't know if she possessed the ability all along but was just held back by poor behavior or if she really has improved her skills. Who knows, but we are impressed with how much she is learning. The areas we have seen the most improvement in are her tracing skills, counting skills, and letter recognition. She can almost recognize all 26 capital letters now and many lower case letter as well!

Two weeks ago, we learned Letter F!  Our theme for the week from the LOTW curriculum was fish. 

We used our fish number cards to make towers out of blocks. She hung with this counting activity pretty well. It was a great visual of the numbers. We are trying to teach her the words less and more, and this activity provided a nice opportunity.

We read lots of Rainbow Fish books. I actually didn't know there were so many, but Ivelina enjoyed them all. She liked making this fish craft too!  Now, every time she sees something shiny anywhere she calls it a "silver sparkly scale." 

Ivelina by our garage door turned school work display.

We did sorting, counting, and graphing activities with Goldfish Colors crackers. We fished for letter and number fish in the bathtub with my makeshift magnetic fishing pole. We traced and glued and colored and read fireman books and fish books. Ivelina truly had a fun week at school!



Last week, we learned Letter T, and theme for the week was turtle. 

Ivie's favorite activity from the LOTW curriculum: the magnet page! She always asks to do this activity again.

Using some watercolors to paint a turtle. I have a watercolor sketch pad and I use a Sharpie to essentially make my own coloring/painting pages for her to use.  Ivelina really likes to use watercolors, and so do I!

Ivelina pictured with her BINGO stamp Letter T page,  her Letter T painter's tape collage, her finished watercolor painting, and her turtle coloring page.

Working very hard on her tracing. The tracing page is simple and quick, so we do it first every day and do all of our old letters as well. She needs lots of review.

Glitter! What kid doesn't love shaking glitter?  We made sparkly letter Tt.  

We read non-fiction books about turtles, but Ivelina also became interested in the Franklin book series. They are really cute. On Friday, we went to see my sister Tonya whose name happens to start with T and who happens to drive a school bus. Ivelina has been really fascinated by the yellow buses rolling through our neighborhood. She enjoyed getting an up close and personal tour of a bus!


Letter T was terrific.  Next up:  P for pumpkin!