Sonshine and Shade: Porcupines and Phonemic Awareness

Hello All! First, I just want to take a moment and express how blessed I feel to be able to homeschool my children and document our time together during this busy, crazy, and wonderful year. This year has already been good for us! Establishing a routine and relationship of learning/teaching takes time and so much work, but it is SO worth it! To see my children learning from my teaching is one of the best feelings in the world! HOMESCHOOLING IS AWESOME!! Don't get me wrong... some days are long and difficult... But the next day is new and full of opportunity. It has been such a good year already.

Down to business... This week we learned about trees as habitats to the creatures that live in the trees, specifically porcupines, birds, bugs, raccoons and squirrels. The porcupine lesson was one of our FAVORITES so I will mostly be talking about that one in this post.

The art project for this day was SO cute! They had so much fun making and playing with their own porcupines.

Jonathan's porcupine turned out so well, and he was able to tell me all about the quills and the "defense" of the porcupine. It was so fun to see what he already knew about the animal. He worked on his fine motor skills with the coloring, gluing, and placing the toothpicks to complete the puppet.

They also made their own porcupines with play dough and uncooked noodles. This was another great activity to practice fine motor skills and learn "bigger" and "smaller."

Hearing Hope say the word "porcupine" may have been my favorite part of this lesson!

The best activities for my Jonathan was the "Pokey Words" literacy activity. He had fun writing and matching the letters and even began reading some of them! I was able to assess his understanding of the letter names and sounds, and how far his phonological awareness has come.

His phonemic awareness is definitely something that we can work on, as I would sound out the word "dig," and Jonathan would come out with a different word. So I would say, "/d/ /i/ /g/" and Jonathan would say "Gig!" with a lot of enthusiasm. Haha! So I looked up some activities that will help Jonathan blend the sounds he hears (or sound synthesis). Some of them are great! Such as this song:

To the tune of "If You're Happy and You Know It, Clap Your Hands":

If you think you know this word, shout it out!
If you think you know this word, shout it out!
If you think you know this word,
Then tell me what you've heard,
If you think you know this word, shout it out!

The teacher says a segmented word such as /k/-/a/-/t/, and the children respond by saying the blended word (pp. 700-701). We will definitely be implementing this throughout our school time to practice.

Another great resource this week was PBS! I got a free subscription for a week of PBS on my Amazon account and I found a "Wild Kratts" episode for every animal we studied! The kids LOVED it, and the show is so informative and fun.