Paint Swatch Vowels and Crayon Resist Learning

For those of you that don't know, I had a baby in early July. During the last few months of pregnancy and first few months of new baby craziness I got out of the habit of doing lessons with my older son. We used to do handwriting practice for about 15 minutes everyday and sometimes we would also read books or practice sounding out words. He's only three, so I felt like that was about as much structured learning as I wanted to push in a day. Well after 5-6 months of not doing any kind of lesson, he doesn't know how to write most of his letters anymore. He even struggles with his own name. This bothers me - probably more than it should since, as I said before, he is ONLY three. However I decided now that the baby is less demanding and even sleeping through the night sometimes (thank you sleep training!), I would start working with him again. The problem is he really doesn't want to learn. He's a really good kid, so I know I could just force it and after a couple of weeks he'd stop complaining, but I want him to like learning so I decided to try some other approaches first. I got on Pinterest and started snooping around (and looking at all that stuff I pinned forever ago and promptly forgot about).

Paint Swatch Vowels

The first thing I decided to do was get some paint swatches to teach my son about the "magic e." It's a pretty simple concept. You get paint swatches with at least five colors per swatch. Mine had seven, so I just cut the last two off. Then you write four letter words that end in "e," making sure that if you take the "e" off, it's still a word (dim/dime, hat/hate, mop/mope). The fifth square stays blank and gets folded over to hide the final "e." As you can see, I made quite a few. Even so, when Ronan found them he was so excited that we went through all but 5 of them before he lost interest. That's another thing I've found. If I want Ronan to be interested in something, I don't show it to him. I just put it somewhere where he will find it on his own.

At first we just read the words. I think I did the first 3 to get him started and after that he sounded them all out on his own. He did really well and I was impressed. Unfortunately, he has not yet made the connection to words that aren't on paint chips. I'm sure that will come later, especially if I use the paint chips to remind him when he stumbles on a "magic e" word. When we were about halfway through, Ronan started asking me what some of the words meant. Luckily, I was prepared for this and had left out words like rap/rape. I included mat/mate, but used the definition for mate as a noun instead of a verb.

Next, I wanted to do an activity with numbers, and I found this post on Pinterest, which seemed perfect. Basically, she made a hundreds chart out of contact paper and then had her kids match numbers written on paper circles to the numbers written on the chart. Since she used contact paper, they could just stick the numbers on when they found them. I decided to use squares since it would be easier to cut a bunch of them. Honestly, we still haven't done this, but my son enjoyed watching me cut the squares so much and begged to play with them for so long, that I decided to do letters too. I made the consonants yellow, the vowels pink, and "y" orange. I made multiples of each letter so we could make lots of words without running out. Then Ronan helped me put them in a clear box with dividers for each letter. So far we have only used them for one activity, but it was definitely a hit.

Crayon Resist Learning

I have always thought that crayon resist activities were dumb. You write out the ABC's or your kid's spelling words in white crayon and then he paints over it with watercolors, making the letters show up. Oooohh. Aaaaahh. And then he's done. Why is going to want to look at this paper after he gets done painting it? What did he actually learn? Did he even read it? I'm not sure what made me even think of crayon resist when my son said he wanted to play with the letters I made and his phonics cards, but for some reason, I did. I had him guess how to spell the the names of the pictures on the cards using the letter squares. Then I gave him a sheet of "magic paper" so he could see how well he did without me saying "no, it's actually spelled..." or "e says eh. What letter says ih?" He spelled pig "pec" for goodness sake! Do you have any idea how frusterated I would have gotten trying to help him correct that?? This way I could just say "Ok, let's see if it's right." And then I could praise him for the letters he did get right and we could talk about why the words were spelled differently without me being the bad guy who has to keep telling him he's wrong. Plus, he'd argue with me ("but I want to spell it pec!") whereas he can't argue with magic paper.

It worked so well that after he went to bed I decided to make some more magic papers. I cut out pictures from the AAA Living magazine I got in the mail that day (I usually just throw it away), and pasted them on strips of paper next to the word written in white crayon. That way they are all ready for whenever he wants to do them and it should take him longer to figure out that I'm still the one writing the word. I'm posting the finished ones on the fridge to help him remember them. This way he gets a refresher on how to spell those words AND reminded of the activity so he'll ask to do it again. I've also been writing his guess on the paper with crayon, though I'm not actually sure why.

The last activity we did was a fall craft. I had lots of scrap papers left over from making the letter and number squares plus I saved the pieces I cut off of the paint swatches. I cut all of those pieces again so that I had more irregular shapes instead of just a bunch of rectangles, and Ronan and I used them to make a mosaic tree on a piece of contact paper. I drew the rough outline so he knew where to put the leaves and I did the trunk pretty much by myself, but he put on at least half of the leaves. He started out placing them one at a time, but decided that was too slow so he ended up dumping them on and then rubbing them around until they stuck. Then I stuck another piece of contact paper on top so it wouldn't be sticky anymore. It would have made more sense to use clear contact paper and then just put paper on top of the finished project, but I started with white contact paper, so I didn't end up with that option.