Marvelous Mondays

Here is Wiggle Worm with his Dr. Seuss Alphabet cards. I let him just explore with these while I was getting ready for Tot School. If he sees me pull out the wikki stix, sandpaper letters, Child's First Bible, LHTH teacher's guide, and whatever else we will use that day...he drives me nuts and I am flustered and we are scatterbrained while trying to do the activities...so today I gave him something to occupy him while I got myself together. Also it is fun to see what they do without direction.We did our sandpaper letters first. We reviewed A and introduced B. We did trace these but I have no pictures of that b/c he spotted the wikki stix before I could snap a shot and he was quickly done with the sandpaper letters. In an earlier post, there is a guide to using sandpaper letters as well as the site of where I got my wonderful wood backed sandpaper letters. These are meant to last. No cardboard paper here. I will make a label as soon as I am done with this post and link all the sandpaper letter posts if anyone is interested. You can also make your own and I will link lots of free printouts and instructions to that soon also.
Once again, I decided less direction on the letter we had already introduced. He did Aa all by himself. B was guided b/c we hadn't had it before. I let him just do what he wants with the pictures. By the time we were through, the ant had about 30 legs and the butterfly was a wad of pink wikki stix.
If you haven't gotten wikki stix, they are great for fine motor skills and learning the formation of the letters. I don't separate ours, he has to pull each one apart from the stack. This is really great for the pincer grip. The cards that we use are the Wikki Stix Alphabet Fun Cards for Learning. I got mine at Therapro.com and they are well worth the money. They are only $13.95 and if you order $35 in an internet order you get free shipping. This is a great site. You can click on the Wikki Stix picture below and it will take you to their site.
We also introduced the number 2 in LHTH today. We were supposed to find in a magazine or print out 2 hands to cut out and glue. Wiggle Worm was not wanting to leave the wikki stix and he isn't that great at cutting and gluing yet...so instead I traced his hands in 2 different color crayons and wrote 1 and 2 in them. This was much better and engaging for us b/c he got frustrated last week with the cutting and gluing. He really got into it being his hands and we counted the hands on the page and his real hands several times.
We will be going back through LHTH as a 3 year old next year and I think we will do more cutting and pasting then. To save stress and frustration on his part and mine. I will cut out or adapt the lessons for his level of ability for now. We will be practicing our cutting and pasting with our Kumon First Steps workbooks. They seem more on the level of a 2 year old boy.