Scissor Time!

As part of our preschool skills work, we're going to focus on the following things during my maternity leave:

• Learning the letters in Katie Anne's name
• Writing Katie Anne's name
• Tracing the letters of the alphabet and numbers 0-9
• Learning all the letter sounds for consonants and short vowels
• Sounding out simple words/reading skills
• Learning sight words/labeling things around the house
• Counting to 30
• Coloring in the lines
• Drawing realistic things like people, trees, houses, etc

and the one that Carrie Beth reminded me of in her blog post about preschool ...

• Cutting with scissors and gluing!

That may seem like a pretty substantial list, but Katie Anne's not starting at zero on anything except cutting with scissors.  Here's where she's working right now...

• Learning the letters in her name: She spells her name K-A-T-N-N-E
• Writing Katie Anne's name: She does a pretty good job already, but still needs help remembering which letters come next (see the first goal...)
• Tracing the letters of the alphabet and numbers 0-9: She does a great job on about half of the capitals and a few lowercase, but we haven't ever worked on numbers.
  
• Learning all the letter sounds for consonants and short vowels: She knows about 2/3 right now.
• Sounding out simple words/reading skills: She's got a lot of prereading skills like book handling, directionality, etc.  She LOVES trying to sound out words, so I really am just going to work on this because she likes to do it already.
  
• Learning sight words/labeling things around the house: She recognizes a few sight words when we read (the, a, in ... maybe a few more).  We're really just going to label simple things like "bed" and approach it that way.
• Counting to 30: She counts to 20, but she always skips either 14, 16, or 17.  So, we'll work on that and then try to get to 30.
• Coloring in the lines: She's getting a lot better at this.
• Drawing realistic things like people, trees, houses, etc: Getting better here, too!

Some of these things - like learning the letters in Katie Anne's name - may take longer.  Nine letters and a space is a lot to remember!  Most of these skills are things that she'll be working on in preschool this year and next year, so I wanted to keep up with the goals while she missed most of the fall on maternity leave with me.  However, we're not putting any pressure on any one thing because she'll work on all of these next year, too.

Today, during our "school time" (and you can tell I'm not following my possible schedule because we did our school work in pajamas), we decided to work on cutting and gluing.  We've been getting tons of toy catalogs - I guess in preparation for the holiday season.  So, I gave Katie Anne a catalog to look through.  When she found something that she would like, she cut it out with scissors.  Then, she glued the toys down on a paper to start her "Christmas List".

Katie Anne had such a great time doing this!  She got so into it that she went back and cut out items for a list for Baby Saunders when she'd finished hers.  She did a great job for her first time cutting with scissors.  She was very excited about it and kept saying, "I've never done this before!  Never!"  Later, after dinner, she wanted to do more.  So, I gave her a catalog with a bunch of Halloween costumes.  I told her to cut out costumes she liked and glue them to one side of her paper - then glue ones she did not like to the other side of the paper. Daddy and I finally had to make her stop and go into the living room to do something else because we were tired of sitting at the table - we'd been there for such a long time!  This activity can definitely keep her busy for awhile, and she loves it ... so it looks like we'll be doing lots of cutting and gluing in the future!