Why did I start this blog? Two reasons, one was to document my family and our adventures. Second, because I am one of those people that just can't stop blabbing about a product that I love. If I ran into you and I knew you were a homeschooler for instance, you would hear about two things - Mother Goose Time and All About Learning Press and their two series, All About Reading and All About Spelling.
I discovered Mother Goose Time 3 years ago and haven't stopped blabbing. But I just recently discovered All About Spelling, so let the blabbing begin!!!!
Lachlan, my oldest, is just finishing up first grade as part of a homechool charter school. We have an educational guide that we get to meet with every two weeks and at one of our meetings we were talking about Lachlan's reading and where we were getting a bit stumped. She asked me, "what about spelling?" She thought and I agreed that spelling might fill in the gaps. I for some reason, did not even think of that! Probably because I really did not want to add another subject to our routine. But we did, and I am so thankful.
It arrived and I started working through the set up. I have to say, many curricula overwhelm me. From the moment the giant Teacher Guide arrives (Saxon Math, oh my!) I shut down. Even the Teach Your Child How to Read in 100 Easy Lessons made me shut down. There are just too many pages!!! Finally, with each of those examples I opened the book, started reading, and hey, it wasn't so bad. But when All About Spelling arrived I sighed, Ah, now that's better. The guides are thin (phew) and cute (I like that) and broken down into easily to digest sections. And this all matters because the teacher has to be motivated to teach.
First we set up the letter tiles as magnets and stuck them to our white board. Then I jumped into Step 1 and started putting the rest of the items together as I went.
Here I had the white board out in the backyard in a camp chair with all our other homeschool lessons for the day.
Each level that they progress through is literally called a step. Step 1 was all about the first 26 phonograms. I got out the phonogram cards, held them up and asked them to make the sound that each of the letters make. If they knew them, they were considered "mastered" and they got to color in the hexagon on the phonogram sheet and put the phonogram card in the mastered file. They already had many of the consonants mastered, but had some more work to do on the vowels. Some of that is because All About Learning Press (AALP) teaches more sounds for each letter than I was even aware of. Like 4 sounds for O. I don't know how to type in all the symbols or I would type them in here. But I will show you a picture of the back of the card so you can see how easy they make it for you. That and they have a free app you can download that gives you the correct sounds, if you are ever not sure.
Step 2 teaches segmenting, which is just brilliant. The best way to show you is in a quick video.
As I was revisiting Step 2 in order to make this video, I was reminded that even step 2 was broken into easy to digest parts that we did not move on from until they were mastered. First we practiced recognizing the first sound of a word and repeating the sound, not the name of the letter. Then we practiced listening for the last sound in a word. It was only after those two skills were well practiced and easy for the boys that we moved onto segmenting words with two sounds and then onto words like this with three sounds.
Step 3 has you start working with the letter tiles and putting them in alphabetical order.
Here we are outside at the picnic table, one doing that Saxon math I was mentioning and one putting the tiles in alphabetic order.
The first 3 steps can be worked on at the same time and a little part of each of the steps are incorporated into your daily routine as you start working through steps 4 through 24.
The routine and rhythm of each day is really what was great for my boys. The phonograms that were not mastered when we initially went through them were put behind the review divider. Out of those letters I would pick 4 to work on daily until they were mastered. Only 4 at a time is an easy to swallow daily lesson. Once mastered they got to color in that phonograms hexagon and file the card behind the mastered divider.
This is the little recipe box that I got for our cards. It has both the reading and spelling cards in it. Super easy to keep the cards organized.
For my boys there have been two big motivators that are part of this program. The first is the word "mastered". They love that word!!! I tell them the goal is to master a phonogram and boom, practice, practice, practice, with out complaint.
Then, to top it off, once it's mastered, they get to color in that hexagon on the progress chart! I had no idea that a progress chart would be so motivating. Not only that but it's very visual. It makes it clear what the goal is that we are working towards and how close they are to accomplishing that goal.
These are all three of our progress charts hanging on the wall.
These first 3 steps were really the foundation that the rest of the lessons are built upon. This has gotten us to where we are today with spelling words with tiles and spelling words on paper.
In this photo I said the word "bug" and Lachlan segmented it in his head and pulled down the letters that make those sounds to spell the word.
I had Peter on the other side of the table and thought I would have him try to write a few of the words on paper. But he was causing a bit of trouble by tapping the water bottle with the paint brush. Eventually he wrote three of the spelling words.
Lachlan loves to be creative, like his Mommy, and came up with this photo idea. So I helped him line up the letters in his hands and snapped a picture.
Believe it or not, he is thrilled with his idea.
At this point Lachlan wanted to be done but there was a few more words to spell. The next word was the word "sun" so I jested, "don't you want to hold the sun in your hands!" He was game.
This time I got a smile out of him.
Anything that brother does, Adam has to do. So Lachlan helped him hold a tile in his hand for a picture.
Adam always likes to get involved. One time he was adamant that he held the flash cards.
When we started All About Spelling the hope was that it would help with his reading development and it has. He has been able to sound out more challenging words because he has a deeper understanding of phonograms. He even spent some time reading our children's dictionary and felt quite accomplished by the fact that he could figure out some big words. When it comes to reading, confidence is key!
Of course teaching spelling also helps with spelling. :) Lachlan has really enjoyed writing notes and is getting more and more accurate with his writing. Here he is writing his end of the year writing example. He wrote "I HElP Mi Mom" and drew a picture of himself helping me pick things up. My back was out and I was having him help with a lot of the bending.
I wrote the team at All About Learning Press with one of my last posts where their curriculum popped up. I kept blabbing to them about how much I love their curriculum and they told me about an affiliate program. The links in this post are affiliate links. If you purchase through the links it will help my family get more of their great stuff! But everything in this post is authentic, I was writing it before I even knew there was an affiliate program.
We had such a fun day yesterday with our Mother Goose Time. We have pretty much been scraping by with the basic subjects the last few weeks with our home torn apart and our routine out the window. So to come back to MGT was a great joy. I really focus the MGT towards Adam who is just over 2 and I can do that easily with the Little Goose guide.
I had opened and not completed a few of the day bags. So I had a bit of a random selection. I chose to first look up what the Little Goose guide recommended to do with the color birds. They told us to put the birds under plastic of some sort and let the kids "wash" the birds. I used our handy dandy pouches and gave him a barely damp sponge.
I set him up on our new counter!! while I prepared lunch. Well I had to take a quick break from food to take pictures and to talk colors with him. I would name a color and he would try to find it and wash that bird.
He doesn't know his colors quite yet though. So I was more or less pointing to a colored bird, naming the color and then having him wash it.
He loved this activity!!!
After lunch we picked up where we left off. I was busy cleaning up so I told Lachlan to be the teacher. This is an awesome opportunity for him to be the "boss" which he so desires to be, at least some times.
Next I handed out the zookeeper books to all the kids. The first year we did this the boys were so young I just made the complete A to zoo zookeeper book and gave it to them to flip through. This year I gave them just the book with the first few letters and plan to give them one new letter a day as we work through all the animals.
Adam chose to write on his zookeeper book. I did not stop him because I know how great the writing practice is for him. However, 3 years ago, had Peter tried that, I probably would have taken it away from him. I wouldn't want him to ruin it. After years of using Mother Goose Time I now know that if I saved EVERYTHING that they give me I would have at least a closet full of stuff. And that's just of the things they give us that can be used over and over again.
Slowly, I have let stuff go. Some recycled and some gifted to friends who are interested in homeschooling or just wanting to have some extra fun and learning over summer break.
Adam was so concentrated on writing and he was being so careful to make small detailed marks on his page. He often scribbles and happily cheers that he "wrote my name".
After our bird washing I moved onto the camel lessons. One of them was to talk about their eyelashes and how they are used to protect their eyes from sand. Before I could even start talking about this Lachlan started describing the details of the camel including the eyelashes. He made it easy on me.
Inside the day bag for Camel day was also the Look and Find Glasses. So we got down the theme poster to take a closer look. He is really good at finding the little white mouse in a children's book series we have but he does struggle with finding the correct image from the Look and Find glass on the poster. Here we were searching for the camel and he got really close.
There it is!
Yay!!
Arms in the air celebrating.
Everyone loves the theme poster. Soon brothers were all around him.
Each month Mother Goose Time provides a blank Look and Find glass to discover all the details of the poster. It always makes for a cute photo.
We found the hippo, Lachlan's favorite animal.
I let Adam keep exploring the poster as I moved onto spelling with Lachlan. We are using All About Spelling 1 for him. He is 7 and in first grade. Here he was spelling with tiles. His spelling words were all words with U as the vowel.
Meanwhile, Peter is pounding the water bottle with the paint brush we were using as a camel eyelash example. I often have him join in with spelling. I asked him to write out the words as Lachlan spelled them with tiles. Then they can trade.
Lachlan came up with a photo idea so we arranged the letters in his hand to take a picture.
He was proud of his idea.
The next word was sun and he really wanted to be done with the lesson but I teased "don't you want to hold the sun in your hands?"
This time I got him to smile.
What ever brother does, Adam has to do. So Lachlan helped him hold a letter in his hand.
I have really enjoyed using All About Spelling and what is most important is that they boys have really thrived under their lesson design. The letter tiles that you see here are all on a magnetic white board. As part of the daily spelling routine they place the tiles in alphabetical order. The consonants are blue and the vowels are red.
When we spell with tiles I say a word, then they pull down the first letter, the second letter and then the third as they sound it out. In doing so, they have spelled the word. It's not quite as simple as that because there has been a lot of foundation laid to get us to this point. But I will have to write a whole post about All About Spelling at some point.
The All About Spelling are affiliate links. I started sharing about the program before I knew there was an affiliate program. All opinions are my own and authentic.
Do you know the difference between a butterfly and a moth? I always thought it had something to do with the color, as most butterflies are colorful and moths are usually a neutral color. But it turns out that a moth changes from a caterpillar to a moth in a cocoon, which is a soft silky wrapping and a butterfly changes inside of a chrysalis, which is a hard shell. Who knew!
I love the fact that even I learn something new with Mother Goose Time. On Butterfly day we learned about symmetry. I wasn't getting much enthusiasm from the boys about the idea of making a symmetrical butterfly pattern, so I did it first myself and set it in front of Lachlan. He was suddenly interested!
He got right to work making his own pattern.
We actually started butterfly the day before these pictures were taken. I started them on the butterfly life cycle craft. Lachlan got a bit frustrated with trying to draw stripes on the wet beans for the caterpillar part of the wheel. So we picked up the project again the next day. Again, he wasn't interested at all in finishing it, so I got started on it by finishing the caterpillar and then he decided to do the rest on his own.
Finishing touches.
While Lachlan was working on his Butterfly Life Cycle wheel, Peter was working on illustrating his bilingual book. I love these little bilingual books, but I really like this one. This one gave them the opportunity to finish the pictures on each page, not just color them. The first page said there was one (una) bee, the second had two (dos) caterpillars and the third page three (tres) butterflies. Well that's what the words said but the page just had a flower and you had to add the rest. I wrote the number over the number word to help them out.
Once he had it illustrated and colored he put the pages in order and stapled it together all by himself. This is where a lot of book knowledge comes into play. He has to know that the pages are numbered and that they go in order, he also has to know which edge to staple and to know that he has to know which way a book opens.
Peter started using Mother Goose Time three years ago when he was just 2 years old. When he was two I would let him scribble on the page and then put it together myself and read the book to him. Now, he is 5 and can do it ALL by himself. What a cool progression of skills!
To keep things going I moved onto this butterfly word family game. We had caterpillars with the full word on it and a butterfly with just the "ug" part and then little square cards to put down on the butterfly to build the word.
I had Peter put a letter down and then find the matching caterpillar card.
These were perfect 3 letter words to practice segmenting on. This is a skill we are working on in our 1st grade spelling curriculum All About Spelling. He used the 3 BINGO chips and slid one down for each sound. /r/ slide one down, /u/ slide the next one down, /g/ slide the last one down. It helps him to break down the words into the sounds that make it up.
Lachlan was across the table FINALLY working on illustrating his bilingual book. I say finally because I had been asking him if he wanted to do it for days. He loves to draw, loves it! So when I saw he had the opportunity to illustrate a book, I thought, this is perfect! My enthusiasm was quickly squashed.
It had to be his idea I guess. But he did do a beautiful job and enjoyed it very much.
Back across the table Peter continues to work through all of the words. First building them on the butterfly and then using the BINGO chips to segment the sounds.
The next day was Moth day and that is when we learned the difference between a moth and butterfly.
On moth day we were given our monthly dose of vocabulary cards. These cards have a graphic and the corresponding word. We were given a super cool sticky butterfly and they got to swing the butterfly, stick it to a card and then read the card.
Adam's turn. He can't read, he's only 2, so I read it to him and we repeated the word a couple of times. But mostly he had a lot of fun with the sticky butterfly and was surprisingly accurate.
Next we talked about moth balls and how people use these smelly balls to keep moths away because moths eat holes through peoples clothes. Mother Goose Time had us put a smelly oil on cotton balls and have the kids try to toss them in a bowl. I put two different oils on 6 cotton balls, 3 cotton balls with each sent. I used citronella on 3 and lavender on 3.
Then I asked them to sort them by smell. It was actually quite challenging because I think some of the scent blended when they were in the bowl together during the tossing portion of the game.
While they were sniffing, Adam stole my camera and took tons of photos. Then he wanted me to take a photo of him. Not a hard task.
It's pretty fun to see them all gathered around working on something together. I would totally do this again but I would not let the cotton balls be next to each other for too long before they tried to sort them.
I have missed all this fun. We have been pretty good about getting all the basic 1st grade curriculum done each day but have not been doing as much of the fun Mother Goose Time learning. Bees & Butterflies has really captured our attention and we have learned so much. We should be moving on to Bubbles, Boats & Floats, but we just can't miss out on any of the Bees & Butterfly fun. So we are finishing every last day before we move on.
