D is 4 1/2 years old.
We did the letter A in preschool corner this week.
Play dough is supposed to help a child with their pencil grip and I want a more hands on approach to learning his alphabets so I am incorporating these great Play Dough Mats to do with our alphabets. It is a great sensory experience as well.
I tried these with him a few months ago and he didn’t seem to interested. This week though he loved the play dough mats.
He did a tracing worksheet even though he isn’t very fond of tracing and written work. I am really confused on what to do about the writing. He doesn’t enjoy it and I wonder if we should just leave these alone for a while and come back to them at a later stage when he is more keen on it. On the other hand though I wonder if the way to strengthen his hand and pencil grip is to practice and get used to it?
He enjoyed the Ear Twiggles file folder game. He had to put all the things that started with A in the A basket and everything else in the blank basket. We also did some of the Letter of Week A activities including this counting apple seeds activity.
He did the sequencing really quick and seems to be great at this.
I bought the kids the Melissa and Doug Cookie Play Food and it was a complete hit. They spent hours in imaginary play mode. This also worked on great skills. It was a great purchase!
Resources we used:
Letter A Activities from Confessions of A Homeschooler
You can find Play Dough Mats here.
File Folder Game from Ear Twiggles
I have linked this post to Preschool Corner. Go to Homeschool Creations to see what others did in Preschool this week.
GReattach idea with the playdoh! Does dean like to color? If so, I was thinking coloring & drawing should be enough to strengthen the muscles in his hand for the time being. Sage started writing practice @ 5 & even then many said she was a bit young. Just a thought! š
Thanks Heather for your advice. I think i am going to stop on the writing practice EXCEPT for the letters in his name. I think it is important for him to be able to write his name. He has already done D… so its just E and N.
I agree that maybe he is just a bit too young for it and his body is more interested in being active than in practicing writing.
Nadia,
I realize you posted this a year ago, but I couldn’t help responding to your question about writing. I would let him be the guide about writing to a point. But first, you can prepare his hand for writing by offering a lot of tweezing, tongs, clay, etc. One hand strengthening exercise we do in my Montessori classroom contains a stress ball (or a squishy ball) and a die. Your child can roll the die and squeeze the ball the number of time the die shows. I use a die from the teacher store that has numerals 1-9 on it. It reinforces number recognition as well. Good luck. The kindergarten year, we stress writing A LOT. My students write the alphabet, upper and lower case, every day from Sept until Christmas. They end up with very nice penmanship.