Literacy Love

Soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo... the literacy initiative begins!

Actually for quite a while now we've been doing a "Morning Message". I first read about it on Jennifer's website and thought it was a great, free and useful little tool. More about it here.  

I tend to do the Morning Message over breakfast. While the boys are eating we talk about what day it is (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday etc), the weather, what we are doing imminently and what we are going to do later.  It didn't take long for Spike to become familiar with the format; the predictability is helpful as Spike likes it when he knows what to expect.  I'm trying to use phonics and cvc words as much as possible to help him become accustomed to them. They are great words to start off with as they tend to sound exactly how they are spelled which is good for kids as it is less confusing for them. The Morning Message is also great because Spike decides what we write; the fact that Spike is so involved with what is being written helps to keep him engaged.

The pink underlined words are words that he recognises/we are working on him recognising.

As you can see we are mainly working on the smaller words at the moment.  On this message he was able to recognise "is", "no" and "at".  We have been doing the Morning Message for a few weeks and I am already seeing an improvement in Spike.  He is able to predict correct linking words such as "is", "in", "at" and "on" etc whilst doing the message and is also using these words more in his general speech throughout the day.

In the afternoon we did a Treasure Hunt.  

I wrote a list of things for Spike to find which he loved doing. Then after he had found all the objects he counted the objects and wrote down how many there were. 

Here he is telling me that there is a difference between stormtroopers and snowtroopers, silly Mummy!

I wrote the numbers first in a light colour pen in the box and then Spike drew over them in a darker pen. He also wrote over the numbers in words identifying each letter as he went.

It was a good activity and will definitely be doing it with him again.  When the weather clears up it would be a good one to do outside including some tree and plant identification. Hopefully by then he will also be ready to do some sort of art activity off the back of it. I'm not holding my breath though. I like the idea of incorporating other learning themes within the literacy activity. So here there was a fair bit of maths but we also talked about machines, which of his animals live on the continent of Africa, characteristics of the animals and dinosaurs and their habitats and the difference between machines and living things. Apparently not doing a poo is one of the more significant points.  

Spud yn dweud nos da....  

xoxo