Sorting Sprinkles: All About Me for Kindergarteners

Last week was all about Adrian! Well, in a way! :) That was his theme for the week and granted his weeks with me are not very long (he attends a German Kindergarten full-time this year), we try to make the most of them! When I first developed the thematic, my goal was to get him to discover more about himself. We had the same theme last year and the focus was mostly on body parts and the physical aspect. This year, although we still talked about the body, we focused more on likes and dislikes, emotions and Mr. Adrian's place in the world. Below is a sample of what Adrian did.

Geography: Me on the Map Booklet

View of the inside

Well this idea has been around quite a bit (I personally saw it first on Counting Coconuts) and I was very excited to finally put it together for Adrian. He loves geography and at five years old, he is grasping quite well that his house is on a certain street and that this street is in a town which is in a certain state and so on. Overall, we looked through the layers of this "booklet" and discussed how Adrian's house was on that street and so on. After all seemed clear, Adrian proceeded to color Planet Earth and Europe. And now, Adrian knows his place in the World! :) P.S. If Adrian were at home more, I would have had HIM help choosing elements for the layers instead of simply coloring two of them by the way but he truly is home schooled very little this year. :( He seemed pretty happy with my choices in images though (for our street for example, I picked a picture of him bicycling on the street with his daddy, added small pictures of his favorite neighbors as well as a picture of a cat who visits us often and lives a few doors down).

Fine Motor / Art : Likes & Dislikes : Cut & Paste

Getting to know yourself is important. At five years old, I sometimes feel Adrian should know himself better. This exercise was designed to get him to decide whether he liked or disliked something. I simply gathered pictures of items I knew he'd like and dislike, and printed them. The two sheets were then presented with a pair of scissors, a glue stick and two extra sheets stating "I like" and "I don't like". First step: cutting the images. Second step, sorting the images. Third step: placement of the images on the sheet and finally: gluing of these images. Adrian really liked my picks for his "likes" (dominos, trains, dinosaur documentary DVD, flag book, and the solar system) by the way. Possibly because they are borderline "obsessions" in certain cases! :) P.S. Adrian does like cats...but not when they mistake the sandbox for a litter box! :)

Language: A Rhyming Poem About Me!

Apparently, we need to read more poetry. Adrian could not find the rhymes in the poem and couldn't give me examples of rhymes he knew either. Pfff. On another note...he really enjoyed the poem I wrote about him...I erased the titled of the poem (his real name) and his entire name on line two but I'm sure you get an idea that it rhymed with line number one... :)

Language: Word Building with the Moveable Alphabet

Surprise! Apparently during his "time off" this summer (aka one month), Adrian forgot almost all the letter sounds...or maybe he was just very tired when he came home from regular German school this week. Either way, this moveable alphabet activity did not go well and it was meant to be revision before moving forward! Ha! The irony of it all. The idea was for me to call a few 3 letter (C-V-C) words for him to spell with the moveable alphabet. We've done this before and he was always very excited and did well but somehow this time, it was very difficult. Needless to say I was speechless and intend to revise the letter sounds before trying again and may be asking for a school derogation soon! :) Here's the words we worked on this week:

leg

hip

bum

lip

gum

Fine Motor / Language: Tracing my Silhouette

Tracing is one of these activities done in preparation for writing. At 5 years old, Adrian should already be writing of course but he isn't due to his very poor pencil grip. As such, we are still in-pre-writing mode, with tracing instead. For this activity, Adrian laid down on a piece of large paper and I traced his silhouette with a pencil. I then invited him to trace over with a marker and to trace over his name and age at the bottom (I had already written those down). Adrian also measured his height using his silhouette and a measuring tape.

Notice a lot of language activities this week? You always will. Adrian is not exactly where I expected him to be in terms of writing and reading so I'll be presenting him with a lot more language activities this year. We'll also be doing quite a bit of math and geography but that is only because of his love of the subjects! :)

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