activities during holiday weeks

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We had too much fun on holiday! haha!

I decided to give us some break time these two weeks for 2 reasons:

1. Giving Den some breathing room. I think I might have pushed her a bit too hard, she needs some time off to play and just be a silly 4 years old;

2. I want to take time to rectify and catch up on some of the things that we usually don't have time to do: like practice piano, etc.

One of the thing that I want to take time off to do is writing. I have never taught her how to write. She did a lot of coloring on her own (sometimes a few pages a day) since she turn 3+ because she loved it. I also let her write some Chinese words but that is all. I have never really taught her how to write ABC or 123.

Recently she has made a lot of mirror image mistakes when she wrote, I know it is a command mistake among kids her age, but I still decided to take some time to teach her how to write, starting basic.

I brought "Writing without tears" from Sonlight but I never seriously looked into it until this week.

I realized that I should have done it earlier!

This is the way that Den holds her pencil (Left Pic), and I always thought she hold it wrong and I wanted her to hold it this way (Right Pic):

Handwriting without Tears ensured me that both ways are the correct ways of holding a pencil. What is even more surprising, when I told my dear hubby ST about it, he said he has always held the pencil the same way Den holds hers!!!!! Hmmm...and we were celebrating our 10th anniversary this year!!!

Anyway, I also start with the basics -using wooden blocks and mat man like what the book suggested. I did not want to spend money buying the wooden blocks, so I use the template in the books and use cardboard paper to make the blocks. Ok, it took me the whole night but saved a lot of money and they looks pretty good to me!

The idea is before a kid learns to write, let her form the letter with the block first. This will help kids to form each letter correctly, systematically, and without reversals.

Besides that, we can use the block to make mat man which will help kids to develop body awareness, drawing, and counting skills.

So far we had fun with this and the best thing is Den did not realize we were studying! haha! She thought we were playing a game! :)

The other thing the book suggested is to use the play-doh to form letters, we have not tried it yet, and that's our activity for tomorrow.

Besides that, we also did some reading at a very slow pace like one story per day. That's very enjoyable.