Elementary school teachers

[styme46]

Or anyone else that might have some ideas....with us being so far away from civilization and full time preschool not available in the town dd goes to school in, ds is home with us all day. I've been using the tv to keep him occupied while we were getting our feet under us and figuring out a daily routine.

I think we are finally at a point where I can dedicate time to ds, but I need ideas on what I can be doing with him to get him ready for kinder in August. He is 4, but will be 5 in August. He knows his ABC's and can count to 20, and recognizes all the capital and lower case letters and can recoginize numbers. He can spell his name if I ask him, but we haven't done any practice with writing or anything like that.

I really want it to be things I can print out, etc so that we aren't logging so much screen time (either on tv or on the computer).

Any ideas?

[imojoebunny]

My DS loved the Explode the Code books at that age, A, B, and C. We also had a lot of Kumon workbooks, but his favorite by far, were explode the code. For numbers, you can pull all the face cards out of a deck of cards and play "which is higher" with the "winner" getting the higher card, matching games, and use manipulatives or fruit loops to count out the number you draw from the deck. If he masters "which is higher, you can move to drawing two cards and having him add them together, but this is something most kids don't learn until kinder.

For writing, we had better luck with "making stories" than workbooks. You can start with having them draw a few pictures for a story, then they dictate to you what they want to say, takes a bit of work to get it down to one sentence, and you write all but one word on the page, then they write in the one word themselves. As they get better, you can skip more/longer words for them to write.

We kept this stupid toy in the car, and my kids loved it.
www.amazon.com/LeapFrog-Enterprises-19139-Scribble-Write/dp/B001W2WKS0/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1481223450&sr=8-6&keywords=letter+practice+toy

[jaycee]

IMO, the best thing he can do at that age is have hands on experiences. Join play groups so he can socialize with other kids. Go to the library. Have lots of blocks, magnetic letters, art supplies, musical instruments, costumes around that he can play with. Take swimming lessons. Plant a garden. Ride bikes.

Read, read, read together. Read more. Read all different kinds of books together: kid cookbooks, magazines, high quality fiction, books from your childhood, nonfiction, poetry.

There is not much benefit, in my opinion, from making 4 year olds do worksheets when they could be doing the above activities.

[styme46]

Dec 8, 2016 15:35:01 GMT -5 jaycee said:

IMO, the best thing he can do at that age is have hands on experiences. Join play groups so he can socialize with other kids. Go to the library. Have lots of blocks, magnetic letters, art supplies, musical instruments, costumes around that he can play with. Take swimming lessons. Plant a garden. Ride bikes.

Read, read, read together. Read more. Read all different kinds of books together: kid cookbooks, magazines, high quality fiction, books from your childhood, nonfiction, poetry.

There is not much benefit, in my opinion, from making 4 year olds do worksheets when they could be doing the above activities.

We live in the middle of the mountains, 45 miles away from the closest town and H and I run a business that we can't be away from so while the bolded are great ideas, they aren't things that we can do...hence the reason why he isn't in preschool. We have plenty of the other things you mentioned around, he doesn't show much interest in them for the most part. He will play with his blocks and color, but they don't keep his interest very long. And today it's 20* so no planting of gardens or riding bikes for us!

[stephm0188]

Read aloud and often.

Aside from academics, teach him to be self sufficient. He should know how to tie his shoes, zip his jacket, and open his lunch containers.

[UMaineTeach]

Get him writing more and learning the consonant and short vowel sounds. As he learns the sounds he can start to write with sound spelling.

I like the worksheets on this site www.allkidsnetwork.com/preschool/alphabet-worksheets.asp
The math, reading, matching, fine motor sheets are all good.

[katfco]

Read, read, read. Practice manipulating simple math, like counting blocks, etc. Make it all games. Talk about colors, days of the week, months of the year.

Caleb is 4.5 and loves games. Zingo is a great sight word game.

Starfall.com and ABCya.com are good.

[vamoose]

My older son started kindergarten this year. He did a play based preschool, but there are definitely some things I wish we had worked on more.

1. Story telling of things that have happened in his life. have him think of something he has done, draw a picture of it, then tell you the story of it and you write down the story.

2. Sight words. There are one million fun sight word games. I wish I had given my son some exposure to them before kindergarten.

3. Coloring pictures that you print out. We did tons of free art, but almost no coloring in the lines coloring pages. They do tons of coloring pages in kindergarten and my son's are messier than many other kids'.

4. Specific physical activity practice. You can look up lists of grade level expectations, but things like standing on one foot, galloping, etc. tons of ways to make this fun.

Other than that, just playing. Since it is just you guys, it would be good if you get down on the floor with him. He should practice taking the lead in play activities, negotiating with you when you have different ideas, and following your ideas. The whole give and take of play is learned, but you can absolutely make a great playmate for practice!