Letter of the Week: R

~ Peeper is 33 months old ~

A Note To My Regular Readers: I may be repeating some photos or stories that I've already published, but I want to put all our learning activities in the one post that's part of the Tot School link-up.

Tot Schoolers: Welcome! If you enjoy this post, please feel free to stay for a while, and have a look around. I'll give you a fair warning that much of my blog is PG-13, but my Tot School link-up posts will always be G-Rated.

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Letter Crafts: R is for Rabbit, r is for rainbow. (Thanks to No Time for Flashcards for both!)

Our ABC box was much easier than last week, as you can imagine! Here's what we came up with: R magnets, r bath foamies, Rr book, R is for rooster card, rattle, race car, rainbow, ribbon, ray, ring, rhinocerous and Mr. Kittie there actually starts with R, too. He wandered in while I was taking the photos, but I figured I should let him stay. BigGaloot is another R, but I guess he can't read as well as Boy Cat can.

When I was brainstorming about what to put in the box, I said to Peeper - rhetorically, I thought - "Rhinocerous! Wait, you don't have a rhinocerous, do you?" and she replied, without even pausing to think about it, "Got a puzzle."

Sure enough, as you see above, her zoo animals puzzle includes a rhinocerous.

Her "letter pages" this week included the 1+1+1=1 Tot School Printables R is for Rainforest and Confessions of a Homeschooler's R is for Rainbow.

She used to be really into coloring the tracing and coloring pages, but she's not so much about that these days.

What she does love, though, are the "matching cards" and the puzzles. I really like the ones that have the Montessori-style matching pages with the blank spaces and labels, as you see below, but when they don't, I just print one color copy of the card page (for laminating and cutting) and one black-and-white copy, to put in the folder, and she puts the cards on top of the matching pictures on the page.

One of the rainforest cards was a parrot. When she first looked at it, she identified it as a cardinal (its body is mostly red), but when I told her that it was a parrot, she said, "Oh, I met a parrot before."

I asked where she'd met a parrot (Actually, she has met one, at the pet store a long time ago.) and she said, "Right there in the back yard." (She has not, to my knowledge, met a parrot in our backyard.)

She told me that several times over the next few days, and I just went along with it, figuring that she's seen many kinds of birds out there, so sure, why not a parrot?

Shrike thought she was talking about a stuffed parrot that the dogs have carried out there.

A few days later, though, we were outside playing and she pointed at the sky and said, "Wook, Mama! Pawwots!"

Mystery solved. There is a sky diving school near us, and on any given clear day, they make several jumps, and we can watch them from our backyard, from the time their chutes open (we can actually hear the fwoop-fwoop of the opening chutes) until they disappear behind the neighbor's houses on their way down.

Parrot = Parachute.

Which is almost as cute as last summer, when she did not yet speak much, but did sign. I was pointing out some parachutes and as they disappeared, I thought she was signing "more" but then between looking more closely, and maybe something else that she signed or said, I realized that she was actually doing the sign for "shoes" because (I assume), when I said "Parachutes" she heard "Pair o'shoes."

Or, several years ago, when we pointed them out to our niece, who was then about five, and she said, "What pirate ships?"

Evidently "parachute" is a very hard word when you are a small child - but Peeper has it down, now.

One of the R is for Rainbow activities was a set of capital / lowercase matching cards, with the letters in little clouds and a rainbow going between them.

Because there were six pairs of cards on each page, the set ended with four blank pairs, so I decided to customize those for our family.

Obviously, she didn't get the whole "match the photo to the word" thing at first, and wanted to do things like put Mommy and Mama together as a match (awww) or put Mommy next to the family photo and point out "Mommy. Mommy. Dat's a match!" (When she did the same with my card, she pointed to each card and to me, in real life. "Mama. Mama. Mama!")

When I showed her the words, though, she got the idea, and with some prompting, and reading the individual letters out to her, she was able to find her name every time, and if I said "Which word says Fffffffamily?" she could find it, and well, probably got "Mommy" and "Mama" right about half the time, as would be expected.

I think I'm going to make some more cards like this, with words and photos, for our extended family and pets, and maybe some other things. I'm also thinking about labeling things around the house, down the road a bit.

Do I really think she's going to be reading and speallnig "refrigerator" any time soon? Well, probably not, but you can't pick up sight words if you never see them, so why not give it a shot.

I'm a little embarrassed to admit it, but Peeper made probably her third trip to the library this week, and the first that she remembers. Shrike took her while I got some work done at home, so I don't know the details, but I think there was much reading of books involved.

I also told her that our MOMS Club is going to be collecting books to donate to the library's upcoming used book sale, which will raise money to buy new books, computers and other materials and equipment.

(This was, in part, to prepare her for getting rid of some of her "baby books" (and "baby toys" and "baby clothes") and giving them to "some babies who need them.")

She put those things together (with, I assume, the Sesame Street game in which you help Grover and Elmo make and sell lemonade to raise money for, among other things, new books for the library) and came up with a new favorite game, "I selling books for the li-bewwy!" which involves stacking up several of her "letter books," carrying them across the room, throwing them around on the floor, picking the up and starting over again.

And this is just freakin' cute.