Quick as a Cricket

This week we’ve been learning all about farms from the “Farms are Filled with Food and Animal Families” Thematic Unit, and Quick as a Cricket was our favorite. I loved the lesson plans for read aloud activities, music and movement activities, small group activities (which we used differently from the prescribed way since we’re homeschooling but still learned something new), and the match to content standards and performance indicators. Malachi loved the pictures and the idea that he could act out animal movements anytime day or night.

The activity I want to highlight this week is the Story Time activity. Like many families, we have been having story time together at least once or twice a day since before he was born, mostly because of big brother who loves to read and be read to, but I honestly never thought about all that my little guy was learning through these story times, and I also didn’t know how to help him learn more. With the AlphaSkills Story Time activity this week I learned both. As we read the story about a little boy acting out the characteristics of different animals, I checked that Malachi was able to listen to and follow spoken directions, respond to questions, increase his vocabulary, engage in conversation, associate symbols with objects and concepts, participate in oral reading, begin to dictate words and sentences, and use the left-to-right reading pattern. Then we worked on his ability to retell the story including what he learned about the characters, setting, and plot by using the following questions: What is the title of this book? Why do you think the author chose that title? What are some of the animals the boy mimics? Why do you think the animals need to be healthy to move like this? And we worked on several new words slow, small, large, tame, etc., which we wrote and traced on sheets of paper and drew pictures to illustrate so that we could use these as rebus words later.

Talk about expanding your story time! That is why I am so thankful for AlphaSkills! For more information about the AlphaSkills Read with Sarah curriculum and our family, see the AlphaSkills Blog Introduction.