Preparing for Kindergarten

We are still working on getting back into the swing of things.  Logi-Bear has teeth coming in and he’s been miserable so school time has been trying at best.  But we’re making the best of it!

And you might notice…Baloo got a hair cut!!  His best friend has a short hair cut and Baloo wanted to have matching hair.  Royal also let us cut his hair short! 

We spent most of this week working on Handwriting Without Tears and Explode the Code.  Baloo really enjoys both books.  I’m letting him go at his own pace so sometimes he does 5 pages and other times he does 2 lines.  He’s really mastering the concepts in both though so I think we’re going at just the right speed.  Next week I’ll be tossing in some more “work” for him though!

This was more for Royal, but I figured it was good practice for Baloo too.  I had them “fish” for the puzzle pieces and then take them to their homes (the piece of paper with the matching color).  If nothing else it was a good lesson for patience and sharing.

We also working on skip counting by 10s.  Baloo can easily count to 29 now but he gets a bit tripped up with 30, and then 39 to 40 and so on.  I got out a whole bunch of popsicle sticks.  We started by counting by 1s to 100.  Then I got out popsicle stick stacks grouped in 10s and we counted by 10s and talked about how much faster and easier that was.  We practiced counting them for a bit.
 

Then I got out 10 popsicle sticks numbered 10-100 by 10s and told him to put them in the correct order.  

Lastly I put out a random number of the stacks of 10, asked him to count how many there were (by 10s) and had him get the matching number on the stick.

We’ve only worked on skip counting by 10s once and he’s already getting it down!   The hands-on work really seems to resonate with him!