Learning fun

JR was having some trouble figuring out word families and putting numbers together. I decided to actually get a little creative and found a way to break the system down into something he could more easily visualize. It has worked like a charm!

First, I typed each letter of the alphabet, in large print, onto cardstock. Then I cut the letters out in such a way that we could "play" them to make words and such. I was then able to show him how to combine 2 letters to make a word family ( -ad) then just change out the first letter of the word to form different words (had, lad, mad, etc). He caught on pretty quickly, and was soon able to spell out his own words.

In math, he was doing 1-10 easily, but had trouble with his teens. We had practiced 20-29, but he couldn't seem to get the fact that you just say the name of both numbers (twenty, one, etc.) I had also introduced the "tens" (30, 40, 50)all the way to 100, but he was also having trouble with that. So I typed up his numbers. In large print, I typed numbers 0-9 in one column, then 1-9 in another column. I cut the 0-9 out to make a single long strip of digits. The 1-9 column, I cut into individual pieces. Then, I showed him how to read down the strip, counting 0-9. Then he was to pick up the "1", lay it beside the "0" on the strip to form "10", and slide it down the strip as he counted 10-19. The process repeated with "2" sliding down for the twenties, "3" for the thirties, etc. He got it in just two tries! It was amazing! In just one day, he literally went from struggling to count above 10 to counting 0-99 with no more than an occasional correction or reminder. Today, I actually had him count 1-99 without his column, and he did it by memory!

Somehow, this system just seems to have made the light-bulb come on his head, and he totally gets it! I noticed his reading lesson went smoother today, and his counting is all but perfect. I will have to remember this method for my younger kids!