Semper Gumby: Settling In

I've been putting off writing for a couple of weeks as we've tried to get settled into our new school schedule. Things have been going really well! We're following a basic Letter of the Week style curriculum, as well as honing in on counting, shapes, primary colors (although he's picking up on those so fast we're moving on to mixing), and his speech skills. Here are some pictures of his first day, unfortunately, they're quite grainy. My camera STILL hadn't come in the mail!!

And in case you have chosen to think that I have a perfect child that is still for pictures, let me enlighten you... It took 30minutes to get 3 halfway decent pics!

We worked on the letter A our first week, and the letter B this week. I've been getting pretty much ALL of my printables and ideas from 1+1+1=1 If you home school young children you MUST visit this blog. As a matter of fact, I'm linking there today!

The current "set up" is to try and give Joe a full hour and 1/2 of undivided attention, 3 days a week, with intentioned play and learning opportunities. He has 3 worksheets that are done at a desk and those are spread out between sensory play, stories, speech and occupational therapy exercises, crafts, etc... For this post I'll focus on the actual sit down work we do (boring I know) and talk about some of our fun "brain breaks" in a future post.

The 3 worksheets focus on different skills. One is tracing, one is coloring, and the third is a "dot" page to work on recognition. I cannot stress enough how SMALL of a portion of our tot school this is. Joe only has to really sit and focus for a total of about 15 minutes, 3 days a week. The rest of the time he is on the go and learning through play. We spend 30 minutes outside or at a park burning energy before this "sit down time" otherwise, there are too many wiggles and it would never work. I have found even though it's a short period of time, his focus and skills are improving dramatically, and without burn out.

Right now tracing is mostly about any sort of basic control we can get to his "scribbles" Left to right, target to target. I ordered these amazing dry erase covers from Oriental Trading, they are WONDERFUL! We can do the same exercise 4 or 5 times without burning through paper!

Coloring is more "free" but he only gets one color at a time and then has to ask for new. So he starts with one marker and will then say something like "All done blue!" and hand it to me. Then he will say "Purple please!" or "Purple pen please!" This is helping him a lot with his speech and learning to express his desires.

Dot recognition helps him find numbers from a field of 10, letters in a picture, or items in a field of 10. Eventually (in the next couple of years) I'm REALLY hoping this will lay the foundation for sight words.

Again; All the printables I use I get from 1+1+1=1 I don't have any pictures of Joe actually DOING his worksheets because I have to be very hands on with him during that time.

So that's the foundation. It's going really well, and we easily finish everything we need to before little Roo wakes up from her morning nap :-)