H is for Horse

My goal over the next few days is to catch up with my blogging. 🙂 Timmy and I have already finished letters H, Y, J, and S. I’m very excited to share with you what we’ve done so far and the FUN we had while learning different concepts through our letter of the week. 🙂 Let’s begin!

Reading

I picked books with prominent H words for our weekly reading staple. I don’t limit Timmy to my recommended H books for the week. I only use it to reinforce the letter. 🙂 My little reader wants different books every day but he also has his favorites that we go back to repeatedly. There was a season that he was obsessed with Horton books! His interest dwindled but was resurrected when they were featured during our H week. 🙂 “The Big Honey Hunt” is one of Timmy’s all-time faves. We also love “Bible stories that end with a HUG” because it ends the lesson with something like “Give the one who likes to share a great big hug!” 🙂

Bible Character

Our Bible character for the week was Hannah and we learned the value of waiting on the Lord. I also let him watch a video from Gracelink on the story of Hannah. Gracelink videos is one of my recent discoveries and what’s great about it is that it has a memory verse and a one-liner lesson that goes along with it. It tells a Bible story through storybook-like cartoons which worked well for Timmy because he wasn’t distracted with too much effects and it got him to really pay attention to what the story was all about. He really liked the video and watched it repeatedly throughout the week! 🙂

English/Language/P.E.

Sometimes I just stare at the stuff we have at home and think of something we can do about it. That week I saw this carton and a used happy birthday gift wrapper. I also saw that we have lots of chopsticks! God once again sent some creative ideas my way for an activity that would harness his gross and fine motor skills, alphabet familiarity, and imaginative play! I wrapped the box, gave him a pair of chopsticks and asked Timmy to hit and punch holes on all the letter H’s he can find. Boy, was it fun and noisy! Haha! He then asked for more chopsticks and turned it into birthday candles! We sang the “Happy Birthday” song repeatedly, too. 🙂 Later on, he used the chopsticks to form the letter H over and over again. 🙂

Arts and crafts

For arts and crafts we made a horse and a house. 🙂 We used construction papers, glue, and googly eyes for the horse. We used both big and small H for these activities. Timmy also wrote lots of letter H on the house he made. 🙂

We also did some handprint art! At first, Timmy was feeling so icky about having to put so much paint on his hands. This little guy uses finger paint, watercolor, and poster paints all the time so it was really a surprise that he wasn’t into it. But when I started to put some on my hands and showed him how cool and fun it was to stamp” your hand on paper, his face lit up! Before I knew it, we were lathering his palms with orange paint and he was happily stamping his hand! 🙂 Sometimes you just need to show that you’re having fun, too, to engage your kids in the activity. 🙂

Writing

I used the missing letter technique again to get him excited to complete the words and write H. 🙂 It’s so amazing to see how his hand writing improves over time. I couldn’t help but imagine what it was like for me when I was starting to write at his age. 🙂 I also asked him to “draw” not write H in different colors! The idea of drawing gets Timmy pumped up more than writing. Since two of his favorite things to do are reading and doodling, our writing activities are done under the guise of these two. I mentioned it before that he wanted to read the words so bad that he gets into writing mode quickly when it comes to guessing the mystery words. 🙂 Using colored pens to “draw” letters got him hooked, too! 🙂 Yay! These are simple but fun activities that can help reluctant writers, especially boys. 🙂

Math

We did a counting exercise using heart stickers. 🙂 Timmy likes sticker activities and I love it, too, because it enhances his fine motor skills as tries to take out those teeny tiny stickers. 🙂 So I decided to integrate that to our math exercise!

Filipino

I just made a simple word list of Filipino words that begin with H along with its English translation. I then folded it when it was time for Timmy to identify the English/Filipino counterparts of these words. In one of the pictures below you will see him mixing his toy animals because I said, “Haluin mo yung mga hayop sa lalagyan.” or “Mix the animals in the container.” We also used these “featured” Filipino words often during the week. 🙂

There you have it! Our HAPPY “H” Week. 🙂 The following week we did Y and I really thought we couldn’t do much about it but surprisingly we had some pretty cool activities and had a blast with it! Stay tuned for our Y week! 🙂