School Time

As many of you may already know, Blake and I decided not to enroll Dalton in any formal preschool program again this year.  Instead, we opted to keep him home his last year before Kinder and I would just continue to work with him on a daily basis.  I do have to take a minute to brag and say he is doing wonderful.  He mastered all his letters and sounds almost a year ago, so this year we have been focusing more on reading and basic math skills.  Here are a few of the things he has mastered:

1.  Recognition of upper and lower case letters

2.  Sounds of all letters including long and short vowels

3.  Counting to 100 by one’s and ten’s

4. Number recognition from 0-10 without any help, 11-100 with little assistance

5.  Knows his phone number

6.  Knows his address

7.  Know days of the week/months of the  year/seasons

8.  Can read/interpret a calendar to figure out what today is, tomorrow will be, yesterday was, etc

9.  Understands weather concepts and can graph types of weather from day to day

10.  Understands basic graphing skills such as, which has the most, least, who has more, how many more, etc.

11.  Can read 50+ sight words such as the, big, can, what, see, run, to, pretty, little, play, etc.

12.  Can read simple “Sound it out readers” with little assistance and complete comprehension of the story being told

13.  Understands concept of addition and subtraction and can solve written problems of each using pictures or counters

14.  Can sort objects in multiple ways such as by shape, color, size, pattern ,texture, etc

15.  Can complete a pattern using objects

16.  Mastered using scissors (which was  big deal since he is such a perfectionist when it comes to cutting things out)

17.  Understands rhyming words

18.  Has very neat handwriting for a four year old boy

19.  Enjoys trying to sound out and spell almost any word

20.  Is beginning to understand sentence structure such as capitalization and punctuation

21.  Understands title, author and illustrator of books

22.  Enjoys having chapter books read aloud to him, one chapter per day and can retell the main ideas of the story from day to day

23.  Can recognize some coins and is starting to understand the different values assigned to each

He doesn’t really enjoy coloring, but painting is always a big hit.    We touched on shoe tying a little here and there, but his current shoes have straps and have put a hold on that skill.  I don’t think he minded that one being put on hold, something about too many bunny ears going through too many logs for little hands to keep up with.  He enjoys “Fun Day Fridays” during school time where he gets to pick the activities and games we play that day.  It usually involves  him beating me in Candy Land, Tic Tac Toe, Memory, Checkers or one of many other games he selects.    All in all, Dalton and I have enjoyed our hour and a half we spend together each day playing fun learning games while Addie naps.  I’ve been very impressed with how hard he works and how much he looks forward to school time each day.  I’m pretty sure I’ll have teaching withdraws when he goes to school next year.  I’m sure Addie and I will pick up and doing some sort of activities, but it’s been fun to see how much Dalton has learned over the past few years even before he started in a formal school setting.  Here are some pictures of Dalton finishing up his math activities one afternoon.  Addie woke up early from her nap and just had to help.