Handwriting and Monkey Academy

I had a stroke of genius this week. First let me say that my daughter's handwritting was far from a delight to look at. It didn't seem to me that it was a problem to any teacher she's had before me. Her sloppy handwriting only seemed to bother me. Yeah, I get that she's 8 but we're talking bad, sloppy, not-straight, uneven sized letters. So, I decided we are going to correct that before we move on to learning cursive.
Since I'd bought a gagillion (yep, it's a techinical math term) page protectors for her time line notebook (see below), I decided I'd put some to good use. When we pulled her from public school, we took her handwriting notebook home with us. But you could find any handwriting sample and do this too. I copied the sample page from the workbook that includes lower and upper case printed alphabet along with lower and upper case cursive alphabet. Everyday, she traces the entire 4 sets of letters with dry erase markers. Despite the look on her face in the picture, she actually loves this. It serves two purposes for me - a) she is imprinting writing her letters correctly and evenly and b) she is being introduced to cursive writing in a non threatening way.

I made notebooks for my boys too. They both attended a local preschool last year. The five year old class used the A Beka preschool curriculum. At the end of the year, we got to keep the workbooks to use any pages that weren't used in class (which was a LOT). I ripped off the sheet that had the entire alphabet sampled and slipped it into a page protector. Followed by individual pages for each letter of the alphabet. Voila! A handwriting, letter recognition notebook for my Kindergartener. He also does a page or two a day with the dry erase markers.

At the end of the school year, the three year old teachers gave our kids little notebooks for them to practice tracing the letters through the summer. I'd never used it so I slipped them into page protectors and Poof! my four year old has his notebook of handwriting and letter recognition for himself. The difference here is that his notebook contains letters that are bigger in size to match his cognitive abilities, the 6 year old's letters are still large, but are significantly smaller than the 4 year olds and the 8 year old's fit 4 sets of letters all on one page.

And that sums up my virtually free handwriting curriculum!

This week also saw the start of Monkey Academy for us.

Two other moms and I rotate weeks teaching preschool to our four boys in our homes. Due to snow, this was the first week it actually happened. Boy were my kids excited! Ashlee is my teachers assistant and she just loves that. The boys all earn tokens for good behavior during the two hours we have them and then they get to visit a treasure chest at the end to redeem the tokens for prizes (candy, bubbles, books, erasers, etc.). Each prize has a token value assigned to it.

My theme for the week was the letter V, the number 11, the color pink, the shape of a heart and the emotion love. We made little mice out of hearts we colored pink and cut out (scissor practice!!), we put 11 apple stickers on an apple tree and counted as we went. We used my ice cream scoops to count to eleven with the eleventh scoop being pink, we filled in an upper case V with heart stickers and glued pink fuzz balls and pink googly eyes to the lower case V, we read the Velveteen Rabbit (a story about love AND one that the Core Knowledge series says every Kindergartener should hear), we learned a little about Virginia and we had a snack of veggies. Each child got a token for *trying* one veggie dipped in vinegar too. One of the boys actually found he really liked it and dipped all his veggies! We had so much fun - even though the boys were all a little rowdy. After all, they'd all been cooped up for two weeks indoors AND it was their first time with a new group of friends and a new teacher (for two of them). I expect it to go even smoother in the future.

Want to see pictures of anything referenced here? Let me know and I'll photograph it for you.

Happy Homeschooling!