Teacher Prep

 

So, I’m not a very crafty teacher.  This seems to surprise people, because I knit and sew and love all things crafty.  The fact of the matter is I’m a painful perfectionist, and it’s very hard for me to do crafts with kids because, well, they’re doing it wrong.  I hate the mess and fuss of it all.  I want learning to be very hands on for the kids, and when it comes to teacher prep, I actually don’t do a lot of cutting and pasting.  We read a lot of literature.  We do a lot of writing.  We play with a lot of toys that require imagination.  There’s not a lot of gluing cotton balls to Popsicle sticks going on over here.

And I’ve learned that’s okay.  There is no cookie-cutter homeschool mom.  Just do what you’re good at, and adjust as needed.

I have learned through the years, and mostly through David’s reading struggles, that the majority of kids are left-brained dominant, but a small percentage of kids are right-brained dominant.  Right-brained learners move information to their long-term memory differently.  They tend to do better with visuals, especially 3-D visuals.  Humor and 3D pictures get moved straight to their long-term memory.  Also, they tend to do badly with flashcards where the question is on one side and the answer is on the other.  They do better where the answer is right there with the question so they can memorize them together.  We have letter flashcards where the letter “A” is directly on top of an apple, not the letter on one side of the card and the picture is on the other.

We have come so far with David, but I’m suspecting that Elias (my other left-hander) might be right-brain dominant as well.  Being left-handed doesn’t always mean they are a right brain learner, but it is common.  For those who deal with learning blocks in their homeschool I strongly recommend connecting up with Dianne Craft.  She has helped us, and so many other homeschoolers so much.

This spring I went on a search for some 3D letters.  Learning to read last year with Elias was painstaking, and he still has trouble reading 3 letter words.  Even when he gets it, he could see the same word a few seconds later, and the struggle starts over.  It’s not sticking after months.  I thought if I could get some 3D letters to help us work through this year, the superimposed, 3D nature, funny, colorful pictures would help it stick.

I found Alphabeticals.  They didn’t ask me to write a review, but I like them so much I just am.  (I’m linking up to Amazon, though, which is an affiliate of mine.)  The bad news is you have to put them together, and they are a little too tricky for kids.  But they are so amazing.  Even my older kids are loving these.

Some of these were harder to put together than others.  I really liked working with Aleen’s Tacky Glue much more than the traditional Elmer’s.  I think it just didn’t slip and slide so much.  You could probably do rubber cement if you wanted to, but I never seem to have it on hand.  Some of them require a weight in them to stand upright.  A paperclip usually did the job, but for ones like the letter “J” I had to go heavier and use a penny.  The book came with great instructions that I highly recommend reading.  99% of the problem that my kids had is they didn’t assemble each letter in the way outlined, and it never ended up well.  Then I had to fix it.

I didn’t do the letter Q according to the instructions, but that was on purpose. There were multiple crystals coming out of the quartz, and I thought that might be confusing for my kids.  It was cute, though, if they were just being on display.  Plus is was the last letter I did and I was so done.

What I find the most hilarious about these cute little letters, though, is they were designed by a biochemist, not an educator.  He designs paper 3D models as a hobby when he’s not working in a windowless basement of a biotech company (according to the back of the book).  It’s just some genius guy blowing off some steam.  I love it!

I worked hard on these, people!  If I show off my knitting for you, you have to see this stuff too.  I’m pretty proud of them.  I’m thrilled with how they turned out.  Now to work on being a laid-back  mom and let my kids play with these works of art…