So...Homemade Activity Book!

Once upon a time Bear used to love puzzles, and he was very good at them! By the time he was 2 he was doing 36 piece puzzles with no issues and even some bigger.
And then he stopped!
Since then he claims he can't do them and if he asks to take them down it's just so he can watch you complete them yourself.
Sigh...

I mentioned this to a friend and she suggested that some children get bored of puzzles once they figure out how they work. For them it's not so much about the picture, but rather how the pieces go together, and once they've worked it out that's it, they're no longer interested in doing any more. I have no idea if this is true or not but it made sense, especially as once he's mastered something Bear usually has no interest in revisiting it.

She did however suggest we try some mazes with him, and so I printed some off and voila, he loved it!
I couldn't keep up with the printing demand though, so I came up with the idea of putting together a little activity book for him that he could reuse whenever he wanted.

I got onto google and even found post of someone who had done the very same thing who already had already had a nice list of links to various activity sheets and mazes. So if you want to print off your own head over to The Best Toys for Toddlers for some resources.



Once I had a variety of mazes, connect the dots & some exercise sheets for preparing to write, I printed them all off onto brightly coloured paper, and then borrowed my sister's laminator to laminate them.
How cool are laminators??? Oh how I'd love my own, definitely one for the wish list!
Then all I had to do was punch holes in them and put together the book using 2 keyrings. Add some whiteboard markers and a cloth and there you have your very own reusable activity book!









You can try find yourself through the maze as many times as you like...










....and if you went the wrong way or made a mistake you can just wipe and start again!





Bear really impressed me with how quickly he understood how to do everything. Here's one of the follow the dots completed all by himself.

Follow the dots is also great for them to learn numbers and sequences...or even help with learning the alphabet if the dots are marked with letters instead of numbers.




And here's bear trying out some the exercises which are to help prepare them for handwriting skills when they're older.

This was the first attempt...and the second line was my demonstration, after this he did them all again and did fantastically well!








And finally I put in a blank page just for him to draw on. And here's his portrait of his Dad. Isn't it just perfect?










And what has our Evie been up to? Well she's a little under the weather with a cold at the moment, but we kept her busy during this with her favourite activity...eating!!!




And when we were finished look what we found lol
















"Huh...What do you mean I have something on my face?"

So - Pen Pals & Writing Letters

Recently Bear's favourite playmate (and my very dear friend) moved away, which was a very sad day for us. But I thought it would be a nice opportunity to send some letters ala pen pal kind of style.

So we agreed and swopped addresses...and then life happened and we were busy and then one day we cleared out the post box and there was our very first letter!

And what a special letter it was,including a picture of Bear's favourite things, an airplane loaded with guns!




Bear really enjoyed getting his own post but when I suggested writing back he was strangely reluctant.
I kept suggesting and he kept saying no...until I realised he thought he had to write himself, so after I explained that he could draw whatever he wanted and that I would write the words for him he was much happier to participate.


I let him pick through the art supplies and he chose

• Paper
• Coloured pencils
• Stickers
  
• A stencil

This was the first time he's used a stencil, and it was chosen because of the transport theme it has.
I showed him quickly how it worked and away he went.
It only took him a moment to realise my pen would work better than his pencils so he appropriated the pen for me and set to it, with a little help from mom to hold the stencil steady and point out any missing lines












Then it was time to use our pencils to colour in all our trucks, helicopters, boats and cars.











I also had it on good authority that our pen pal has fondness for stick on tattoos, something which I happen to have a lot of via some marketing ploy through The Dad's work. So we were going to include some with our letter, but of course Bear needed to know what they were all about so we tried one out on the back of his hand.








< waiting patiently for The Mom to say it's ok to remove the paper





Then it was time to decorate with stickers.






I tried to get him to pause and pose with his tattoo for a moment, but the split second he conceded I couldn;t get the camera to focus and the moment was lost...so instead here is a pic of it while he was doing the stickers













Once Bear was happy with the final results I turned over the page and started the letter.









He helped me address it ( I held and guided his hand)





And then it was time for him to dictate the letter to me. At first he didn;t really understand, but after we read our letter again and then talked about what we wanted to tell our friend he got the hang right away.

And he also wanted to break the exciting news that he's going to have another little brother or sister soon!

Once I'd written he decided more stencilling was needed and had another go.
This time he really did a sterling job I thought, and with minimal help from me!
And we signed his name together to finished it off.


And so our letter was done, popped into the envelope with the temporary tattoos and a letter from The Mom to the other Mom.
Bear accomapnied me to the post office and helped send the letter on it's way across the country to our friends.

And we're looking forward to getting our next letter one day soon we hope!









After all that a well deserved nap on the bean bags was in order!

So - Reading, Writing & Arithmetic

Along with the majority of the world, I agree that reading, writing & arithmetic are the building blocks of learning. Once a person has mastered these skills they can essentially learn anything they set their minds too!

But when is the right time to start learning these skills and how long should it take?

Well I was shocked when I came across the following passage in the book Dumbing us Down by John Taylor Gatto (which I highly recommend by the way)

"Were the colonists geniuses? No, the truth is that reading, writing, and arithmetic only take about 100 hours to transmit as long as the audience is eager and willing to learn. The trick is to wait until someone asks and then move fast while the mood is on. Millions of people teach themselves these things - it really isn't very hard. Pick up a fifth-grade nath or rhetoric textbook from 1850 and you'll see that the texts were pitched then on what would today be considered college level. The continuing cry for 'basic skills' practise is a smoke screen behind which schools preempt the time of children for 12 years and teach the the seven lessons* I've just described to you."

Did I just read that right?
100 hours?
And not 100 on each subject but for all 3?
Surely it can't be right?
But indeed it can - the thing is once you're ready to learn something it actually doesn't take all that long, but if you're not ready it's like banging your head against a wall repeatedly!

So why exactly are we taking our children and insisting they all learn the alphabet by a certain age, or their times tables by another age?

Surely our time, and their time, would be much better spent waiting until the specific child showed a readiness to learn and then forge ahead?

If faced with the choice of spending 12 years learning something as opposed to doing it in a 100 hours, I sure know which I would choose!

So now what?

Unfortunately all this brings me to a bit of a dilemma.
While I love the freedom and idea of unschooling, and just waiting for my children to one day decide to learn these skills, regardless of the age they are at the time, I also still really really feel strongly about them being able to master these skills as soon as possible. So do I forge ahead and go on and on and on about the alphabet now already, or do I bide my time and wait?

Well I'm still working on it but I guess some kind of middle ground is where we'll settle.
For the moment I'm following Bear's lead, as in I introduce something and if he wants to then we continue with it.
He's not a cooperative kind of person at the best time so forcing him to learn the ABC song, for instance, is like trying to stick a camel through the eye of a needle.
Incidentally he actually DESPISES the ABC song and won't even let me get the first few letters about before all hell breaks loose, never mind even attempting to repeat it.

On the other hand he LOVES reading his story books, so I spend a lot of time doing that.
He also enjoys some online websites like www.starfall.com which are suppose to help with teaching the different letters and phonics etc,
So in a way I guess that's good enough for the moment, he is only 3 after all, but it's taking everything in me not to go out and buy "How to teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons" right now!




And while I may be holding out on the instructional book right now, it didn't stop me grabbing 2 jars full of magnetic letters for a fridge today, thanks to Woolies & ELC ;)







If there any other homeschoolers reading this post I'd love to hear your approach to the three R's, did you let your child lead the way or did you start working on them as soon as possible?

* This paragraph is taken from the speech he made in 1991 when receiving his New York State Teacher of the Year Award, called "The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher" - so the seven lessons referred to in this paragraph are the ones listed in there. I will be discussing them at a later date, so if you're interested please come visit again!