Mommy School

My son named our summer study "Mommy School" and it has become a favorite activity.  It started with my commitment to offer continued structure during the summer.  I set up a small desk in our library so we would have a different environment and it didn't take long for him to eagerly dash upstairs after breakfast each day to do "Mommy School".  I didn't include weekends originally, but we often did it then too because he loved it so much.  So, what's Mommy School?  This was my original schedule and he would cross off each thing as we completed the action.

Cameron's Mommy School Schedule

Letter of the day

Pick a sand paper letter and trace it

Construct it with wood pieces

Practice writing it in upper and lower case in the writing book

Read the letter book together

Number of the Day

Pick a sand paper number and trace it

Construct it with the number rods

Practice writing it in the writing book

To the computer!

Make a list of words with letter of the day

Write a story with the number and letter of the day

Reading

Read our story together and a book from the bookshelf

Letter of the day: The Montessori sandpaper letters were wonderful for providing that sensory feel of the letter.  The wood pieces are from the "Handwriting without Tears" curriculum which helps kids see the shapes in letters (long line, short line, small curve, big curve) and provides a great manipulative as well.  The writing book was dry erase and allowed him to start by following dotted lines and progress to practicing without the guide. The letter book was from a series where each book had a child character with the name of a letter.  We'd read the book that corresponded to the day's letter. 


Number of the day: The Montessori sandpaper numbers provided the same sensory feel and the rods helped with visualizing quantity.  


To the computer & reading: Yes, he would dash downstairs in a mad rush :)  I was amazed with all the words my little guy could come up with starting with the given letter.  It was such playful fun to build the story together and find pictures online and then print the whole thing out and snuggle down for reading together.  By the end of the summer we had a whole shelf full of his books and we even repeated a few letters because he had more ideas and wanted to revisit a few sounds.  The books were 4-7 pages long and all the words that started with the letter of the day were printed in red (and the number was in blue), so it had a nice visual appearance with the words as well as the fun pictures we'd picked together.

Just in case you think we couldn't do the letter Q, here is the text for that story: Once upon a time, there was a quiet porcupine with twenty six quills.  He was quite shy and would quickly hide when he saw a queen moose.  He liked to hide in a quaint little house and cut pies into quarters.  That made him so happy, his quills quivered.  The end.

We did need to combine W and X though: Once upon a time, there was a mommy and daddy walrus who wanted a little boy walrus.  Then a baby walrus came along to help them with that.  Then they got so busy, they went back under the water.  A wolf was watching and he thought the walruses were silly.  He wanted to raft on white water all the way to a waterfall.  He tried but fell out and the ambulance drove on a windy road to take him to the hospital where they took thirty one x-rays.  Then all the animals had a watermelon party and played the xylophone until sunset.  The end. 

Subsequent years, I did phonemes, added workbooks, read (with comprehension questions), wrote the directions on a white board (key skill for school), provided a choice of writing activity (card, journal, picture description) and math activity (word problems journal, abacus carrying practice, Montessori beed work), and physical challenges with an obstacle course (the first year we had lots of out-of-the-house physical activities).  Whatever I honed in on for a given summer, I made sure we were looking at no more than 1- 1 1/2 hours.  It provided structure, play, learning and didn't get to drawn out so we would have a full day to plan when finished. 

Now this summer is going to be much more complicated.  I'm looking at the History at Our House curriculum and the Visualizing Verbalizing program.  We have some amazing music learning software and math websites to explore.  I found a cool microscope and am interested in potentially adding science.  He is doing spelling with a technique that is supposed to help him see the non-phonetic words in his head (he bounces a ball hung by a stick once for each letter as he spells it both forwards and backwards).  There are social learning projects that often capture his interest too.  So... I'm sitting down to gather all my thoughts and information together and then I'm going to have a good chat with my little guy.  He's much more mature and we'll figure out the plan for this summer.  Lots of work for me to set up for... lots of summer fun!  I know one of my friends is into planning her summer curriculum and I'd be thrilled to hear what you've got planned.  There are definitely vacations in the works too, but that's a different post :)

For a smile, here's the M story (a shorter one) with pictures: