Pre-K2 printables

I just realized that I haven’t explained my new schedule on the blog, so here ’tis: since things seemed to be veering into triteness, so I decided to post Monday-Wednesday-Friday instead, which will give me a small break on the weekends, and at least two days to muse over each post instead of necessarily writing it start-to-finish all in one day.  Hopefully this leads to improvements.  (Not being pregnant also usually leads to improvement, but I can’t do much about that one!)

School is… continuing.  E has some difficulty figuring out how to tell letters apart, which is more frustrating to me than I would like.  I’m trying to teach her what kinds of things to look for to distinguish between them–and oddly, once she knows a letter, she knows it well–but telling things apart and seeing similarities and differences is a skill, I suppose, and I didn’t realize it.  I guess I thought it was like seeing: you just do it!

We read my favoritest of all favorite childhood books yesterday: The Spider and the Fly, which is a lavishly illustrated version of this poem (the right one).  Part of the way through, E started acting quite scared of the spider and was even saying things like “don’t eat fly!  don’t eat fly!”  I was afraid that she might be thus traumatized by the ending–the spider does indeed eat the fly–but she didn’t seem to mind.  I think the fly ghost might have confused her a little bit, since she probably doesn’t know what the giant stark tombstone the fly ghosts are huddled around even is!  Anyway, it’s a great, great story, and I can’t wait until the kids are old enough to really thoroughly understand it.

I’m making a new section on the blog (at the top): printables.  I haven’t had as much time to put into these as I’d like–mainly because I’m generally putting them together hurriedly at night after E goes to bed to use them the next day–but I’m hoping as the school year wears on, they’ll get more focused and diverse.  In the meantime, here are two new alphabet sets to trace.  The idea isn’t to learn how to print, but rather to encourage deeper studying of the actual letter formations themselves to enhance recognition.  (I.e., it’s more of a print-based font than a handwriting font.)

I turned E loose on them today (just the letters she already knows somewhat) with a bright marker and she had a blast!  And it seemed to help her learn to recognize the letters better. The important thing is that two-year olds are GREAT at destroying things like formal workbooks, so I’m finding printables indispensible.  Each one covers the whole alphabet, and then we can toss “˜em when we’re done.