Friday, March 13, 2009

Some Early Learning Things

These are a couple of things suggested in Aidan's OT consult yesterday.

Cornmeal tray -- I made this a long time ago but just found it in the pantry today so I brought it out and put it with their word cards from Spell to Read and Write.

I wrote a word in the cornmeal and then Aidan and Paddy both traced over it. This was easier for them than handling a pen.






Later, in the evening, Aidan read one of the journals that we had written together a couple of weeks earlier. He did really well, actually, is recognizing far more words. Then he wanted to make another journal. I wrote it and we read it back.

Then he asked to write some words himself. Below is what the OT recommended because he tends to lose control of his pen and sprawl his letters all over the page. She thought his pencil grip, control and everything were fairly good and that he was ready to work on writing smaller and within spaces. So she made boxes and this seemed really helpful for him.

The words here are his choices. These are some of his favorite words:

























After we had written them out in the book, he wanted to cut them out.

























Here is a game he made for himself with a lid and marbles. He loves to roll them back and forth and this is actually good bilateral control because he is hemiplegic (his left side doesn't work so well after a stroke in infancy).
























Brendan brought the beautiful wooden USA puzzle out of his room and Aidan tried to do it today. Of course it was too difficult for him but he did all right. Please pay no attention to the crumbs all over the rug. That is life around here!

3 comments:

  1. Anonymous4:44 AM

    Hmmm ... I wonder if my 10-year-old, who is a struggling speller, would find the cornmeal activity way too "babyish." :-) (I also have a cache of colored sand (left over from a long ago co-op activity) that I could use. We've let go of the spelling curriculum, but it's tough to see him struggling to get through two or three lines of an e-mail, not knowing how to spell even the "easy" words. What do you think?

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  2. Your 10 year old is such an artist.... if there were some way he could make the spelling into art, like calligraphy or cartooning or something? Kieron got better at spelling after he started making comics on the computer and writing on the bionicle message board.

    A friend of mine had her daughter keep her own "dictionary" with the most frequent words in it. I guess in a way that's what the first part of Spell to Read and Write is about.

    Charlotte Mason mentioned the idea of having children get a visual picture of a word in their mind, and I wondered when I read that if it would be helpful for strongly visual kids.

    Sean didn't spell well until last year -- he got interested in the dictionary and carried it around a lot. Probably looking for the weird words : ) but I think he used it for spelling sometimes too.

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  3. I LOVE Aidan's words!

    GREAT WORK, my little friend!!!!

    Can you write me a letter and mail it to me? I promise to write back!

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