A few weeks ago we began our fun journey with Before Five in a Row.  The first story we did was, “Jesse Bear, What Will You Wear?”  We bought it from Amazon; you can get it here.

Jesse Bear’s bathtub and rubber ducky counting game

I found a ton of printables online for many of the books.  I really like Homeschool Creations.  She has a TON of great resources on her sites.  Some of the activities are too old for Lexie, like writing her name, or retelling the story.  But what I did was asked her how to spell her name, and I wrote it for her.  Then she could trace it if she wanted to.  I also had her retell the story, and wrote it down for her…  She liked all the activities, and every day wanted to know what we were doing next!  She doesn’t like to draw pictures, I’m not sure why?  She likes to color, but she rarely will just “draw pictures” of things.  I know she has the imagination to do it, she doesn’t want to.  So I don’t push it.  But what she LOVES to do, is just color/scribble on a piece of paper, make marks, etc. then tell me “look, i made a ‘blank.'”  Usually it is the letter V, O, I, L, or a number like 7.  And she is right, whatever it is looks exactly like what she drew.   Maybe a love for drawing will come later.

Lexie now knows all her letter sounds.  She still confuses G with J, U and Y … and that’s about it.  She likes to walk around while playing and say a letter, then the sound and a bunch of words she knows that have that beginning letter sound.  So her conversation (with herself) may sound like this, “B is for /b/, /b/, Bubby. or ball.  Or bounce.  Or banana.  Or bean.”  And she will do that with lots of letters.  She is definitely going to be my early reader, but I really don’t want her to start too early.  Research has shown that early readers don’t progress any faster than a later or “on time” reader.  So really, good readers all end up on the same level by the age of 8 or 9.  Whether she reads at 4, or 6 doesn’t matter to me, as long as she gets a good, solid foundation she will progress at whatever rate she is developmentally ready for.

Here are some of the activities we rowed for our Jesse Bear week.

This was beginning sounds, and the first sheet we did.  Notice how BIG and uncontrolled her circles are on this page, compared to the next page.  I gave her “shirt” since it is actually a blend sound /sh/ and chair, since it is also a blend.  Towards the end she just wanted to circle all the letters.  haha She was to circle the ending sound.  I said the word and the sound like “bear. /r/ /r//”  Then she circle what sound she heard at the end.  I gave her “rose” because the E is silent