Noa - the kindergardener
- Aug 11, 2015
- 2 min read
Having multiple children at different age to homeschool is of course a challenge of its own. We need to be able to organize and schedule better. My strategy is to give one child a simpler task to do – that requires less attention and give a more elaborate and more difficult task to the other child. At the moment, our focus on Yael is reading and writing. She can mostly do and follow basic guides by herself, but oftentimes, she does need more mentoring in tackling a more elaborate writing/reading. When this happens, I would assign Noa to do a simpler task such as, coloring or paint by numbers or even watch French Nursery Rhymes on youtube (which she absolutely adores, of course).
Our focus on Noa, since she is entering kindy, is to hone her motoric skills, logical thinking, alphabet, numbers and expressions/emotions. We are also building her vocabulary, be it in French, English and/or Indonesian. Every day after lunch, she spends 30 minutes to chat with her paternal grandfather via Skype (ah, modernization!). The conversation varies from talking about just daily activities, or reading together or doing French nursery rhymes. Of course, like most trilingual children, we are faced with mixing languages, and this is of course normal for young children (why, even we adults do it!).
Another point we need to address with Noa is her motoric skills. She is highly imaginative, creative and resourceful, yet she needs to be guided to be more careful in being neat in writing and coloring.
The picture above is a drawing of Noa, it is her version of a lion in a savannah.
To improve her motoric skills, we asked her to do activities that requires being careful with handling small stuff or fine objects. For example: skewering beads.
To do this, I used an old chopping board, a few different size beads and bamboo skewers (stood upright on the chopping board using pate-a-fix). I got her to insert the beads, from smallest to the largest.
You can also try to get your little ones stringing beads or simply buttoning a shirt. I tried getting Noa to tie her own shoes but she gave up after 20 mins, obviously this is a work in progress :)
Using the same chopping board, beads and skewers, I asked her to stick names of notes under each bead (from smallest to biggest bead, hence lowest to highest note). She then got to point a note and I would play it on my recorder so she could make a song - well, sort of. This exercise had nothing to do with working her motoric skills, but she certainly loooooved the idea.
Sometimes, we get a little sidetracked from our original intentions, but remember with young children what is important is that learning should be made to be fun so they associate learning with an activity that they love and enjoy doing. Moreover, this is the beauty of homeschooling, you and your children get to decide on what to learn and which subject to dig deeper on.
Have fun teaching!
Comments