Well, it's been a minute... My apologies for the silence, life happened... what with going back to work, The Cub's first birthday, Home Ed life, Halloween and Bonfire Night, and then the festive season descending on us (which, when you work in retail had been gradually building since August) time has just run away from me.
We have been up to all sorts of things since the last time I posted, but I'm going to just highlight a few things and then attempt to keep up a little more from now on!
As for Bear's learning, he is coming on in leaps and bounds. We kept up with number and letter recognition, and he now knows numbers 1 - 5 by sight, and the others when in order, but not always when out of context. We have done a letter a week, both the capital and lower case letter, and have worked on their name and their phonetical sound, as well as being able to match them together. We have made it to 'Ii' in the alphabet, and have been making a handprint alphabet as we've gone along.
We have magnetic letters on the fridge, which has the new letter added to it each week, and Bear can confidently match the upper and lower cases together. The past letters stay up so the repetition of the start of the alphabet is only cementing his knowledge. He's always so proud of himself when he's matched them all up :)
Since the start of December, I have eased back on the intentional learning we'd been doing with numbers and letters in favour of more crafts and lots of Christmas reading and outings!
We read two longer picture books than normal too, the intention was to read them over multiple sittings, the idea being to see how he would take to a read aloud of chapter books, but he was happy to sit and listen to the whole story. We then wrote book reviews for them, as this is something I would like him to do for chapter books as it is a great way to judge how much of it he took in and understood.
Bear has discovered a love of colouring that he didn't have before, going from scribbling across the page one minute, to beautifully neat and in the lines the next (literally, from one page to the next in the colouring book while I was cooking tea one night) - and since then has regularly chosen colouring when before he would actively avoid it...
We will pick up the intentional learning again in January, but until then, his number and letter recognition is coming from real life situation, like being out and about, writing Christmas cards and his letter to Santa, which he wrote his name for, and in play, which is more than enough.
Momma Bear x
Doing great Toby
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