I'm both excited and worried about Wiley starting 1st grade. He had a ton of trouble when we tried transferring him in during the last month or so of Kindergarten. They weren't really concerned about his academic skills, mostly it was behavior related. As in he didn't want to do anything the rest of the class was doing. Plus he said it was boring. Lovely. However in order for me to try to reinforce better learning behaviors, I'm going to try my hardest to "play school" and review some basic academics with both Wiley and Cyrus at least once a day before school starts. Poor Cyrus was born two months too late to start Kindergarten this year. I hope to get him back into some kind of preschool again this fall as well.
Plus "playing school" will give us something new to do. We all know how I scramble to find things to do with the kids that doesn't involve staring at screens. At this point I've totally done almost all of the 10 of the things I joked about NOT doing with your kids. Twice.
But where to start? I'm pretty good with getting them to do artsy type stuff, but haven't really tried the three Rs. Sing the ABCs? Count to 100? That's baby stuff mom! While it would be cool to whip up my own lesson plans, who has the time? I've been meaning to stop by a bookstore to look for workbooks but never got a chance. Instead I did what I do best and googled something along the lines of "learn to read printables" and was happy to find just what I was looking for come up as the first link.
Starfall.com started in 2002 as "a program that would be available online across the world to all children who are learning to read in English." I found their Download Center and printed out the Level 1 Reading & Writing Journal for Wiley and the Kindergarten level ABC Printouts for Cyrus.
We started this afternoon once Milo went down for a nap. I used "watching some Cartoon Network videos when we're done" as an incentive and sat them down at the table with pencils, scissors, markers and a stapler. I got a little bit of attitude from both of them, but we worked our way through several worksheets each and then read a little book that Wiley had cut out and stapled together. It took about 35 mins, and I think that is about the limit, as Cyrus was starting to sass & squirm and Wiley was under the table at one point (until I reminded him if we didn't finish there would be NO VIDEOS).
The true test will be to see if I can keep it up AND keep them interested. What might help is that I noticed that these printouts also match up to an interactive web site. So maybe once they are done watching an online video of "Flapjack" (what the hell IS that show about? talk about killing brain cells) I'll have them review the "Zac the Rat" story at starfall.com. Maybe reviewing on the computer will be overkill? Guess I'll find out. If anything, these kids are going are going to be pros (read:geeks) with computers!
Edited to add: Well, we missed a couple days after two in a row, but started back up today without too much of a fight. Haven't done the interactive web site yet. I did find that the ABCs printouts at starfall.com, after having 4 worksheets for letter A, started only being 2 worksheets long per letter. So I found another site for printing out additional letter work: First-School PreSchool Activities & Crafts, and their Alphabet Worksheets. That meant Cyrus was able to do some cutting & gluing today while Wiley finished up his work.
Also, I found some numbers/math worksheets to try with both of them next time.
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