After receiving quite a lot of pushing advice from family and friends “in the know” Wayne and I are going to specifically work with Charlotte on her alphabet recognition. Hear that friends and family…were doing it – message received! ;)
About six months ago, right around Charlotte’s 3rd birthday, we heard about some preschool work Charlotte’s cousin, Brennan, was working on. We were amazed by all the things he already knew and could do so we started doing fun/educational “homework” with Charlotte then. Mostly we worked on her cutting skills, tracing shapes, colors, and vocabulary. Lest you think we are prepping her for Harvard – when I say we “worked on” these things, I mean that anytime Charlotte wanted to do pages in workbooks we have laying around we called it “homework” {hoping for a good word association in the future} and worked with her to make it fun and educational – instead of just leaving her alone with the “please don’t use those crayons to write on the curtains” smile. Not really any big deal or structured thing but she has enjoyed it and seems to just soak up everything – especially if we make it a GAME!
Although she is 3 ½ Charlotte will not formally learn her letters until preschool next year so we feel like there is no pressure for her to “get it” right now, whatever she picks up will just be an added bonus. We have timed it so that she will finish the alphabet work at home right as she starts work in preschool. After a lot of advice we knew that working on her alphabet would be helpful for her in the future and as long as it was fun she should be able to pick it right up.
We were told in no uncertain terms decided to start the alphabet lessons by using the letters in her name first so we are starting with “C” instead of “A”. The plan is to focus on uppercase letters spending about two weeks on each letter. There are no “lesson plans” just worksheets and activities I have pulled from the internet. At the end of the two weeks we will compile all of her activities in a three ring binder to make her own alphabet book. Although we display every little thing she creates in preschool I knew I wanted a specific place to put the letter work so that she can see it all together. Hence this bulletin board on her bedroom door. As you can see its set up for the letter “C” but actually it’s already changed somewhat from this picture because we did some more worksheets today. So far she loves it!
Anyway, it will be neat to see what she had learned in a year…stay tuned.
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