We were lucky to have my in-laws visit us for the holiday weekend. We took advantage of a fresh audience and introduced Grammie to the pleasures of Mother Goose Time. She loved it and the girls loved having her there.Miss M loved showing Grammie how we do circle time and how much she knows already. We introduced our letter of the week (Ff) and then she used a magnifying glass to find as many as she could on the world map.
The skill of the day for us was fine motor in the form of the I am Special trees and F is for Fox crafts. I let both girls use the glue on their own (for the most part--I added extra glue when they indicated they were done since they tended to put it just in one spot) and was proud of myself for letting go of a little more control. Littlest got a somewhat frustrated trying to release the metallic hearts so I helped with that but she picked them up herself and used the glue bottle to squeeze out a well-measured dot of glue. She liked having her hand traced, even though it tickled a bit. Miss M really likes tracing her hand (although Grammie helped with this one) and insisted on doing it herself in her journal, with just a little help from me to keep her hand from moving too much.
With the Fox craft, I brought out a pack of dollar store Christmas stickers (it's what I had) and I let them choose what they wanted to use to decorate their fox. When they pointed to one they wanted I did my best to use a word that began with "f" to describe it, like funny rabbit or furry mouse, or used it in a sentence with as many "f" initial words as I could think of such as "Father Christmas is frolicking in the frosty air in his sleigh pulled by Fred the Reindeer." We called this auditory bombardment in the speech therapy world. I was doing it in the context of teaching children to say the sound correctly but it works just as well in teaching the sound a letter makes. I used to make sound collage pages with my students, using stickers, magazine and newspaper photos or pictures they drew themselves. When I worked as a reading tutor before graduate school, I helped the kids make their own personal alphabet books, which they loved. Using stickers helps them with their pincer grasp and finger strength, as well as coordination (it takes a bit of maneuvering to get those stickers off your fingers and on the paper in one piece). All in all, it was a fun morning with MGT.
No comments:
Post a Comment