charts and incentives
Monday 
around lunchtime 
Mystie
Hans was able to do the place value and counting to twenty with ease last week, so we moved on to addition. The math curriculum has an addition facts chart and encourages the children to color in each row of facts as they learn them. So I copied the chart, put it on the fridge, and drew Hans and Daddy walking to an ice cream cone at the bottom corner of the chart. The zero-facts were used primarily to introduce the concept and symbols of adding. Hans watched the “how to teach lesson 4″ video with me and didn’t even need it retaught by me to complete the whole lesson sheet, which had 14 problems (4 write the equation pictured, 8 standard equations, and 2 word problems) and Hans did them all in one sitting! We used the blocks to “build, write, and say” every one, and he was doing the whole process himself by the end, so he really had mastered the lesson right away. That was Friday. Monday Hans read and said the zero-facts from the copied chart without building or writing, and colored in all the zero-facts. Actually, he drew people or motorcycles or trains with steam on top of each equation. So tomorrow we will do lesson 5, adding by 1. We watched that lesson on Friday, too, so I’ll try my hand at teaching it cold.
I have also seen around that some people keep track of the first 100 books their children read, and so I decided to do that as well. After copying the addition chart, which has 100 equations, I decided to make a chart for the books, too, and I drew a present at the bottom of the chart. My parents bought each of us our own Bible after we could read smoothly on our own, and we are going to carry on that tradition, too. I figured reading 100 books would probably mean he is reading independently, and it gives a concrete goal for giving him the Bible. We bought The Children’s ESV hardback this summer when we ordered other school books, and I had been wondering how the logistics of deciding when exactly to give it to him would work out (I had already assumed it would be a year or maybe more until he was ready for it, but I wanted to have it on hand). He doesn’t know that plan, so the picture of a present at the bottom of the book list was a surprise and the contents is still a surprise. He already has the first 11 Bob Books listed on his chart. There are 18 books, and at this point he could probably read them all, but we’re taking them at a few new ones a week to make sure and reinforce what he already knows. He’s already ahead in reading ability, so I’d rather he get the basics he has down pat than forge ahead until he’s struggling. After the Bob Books I have a couple first-grade readers my mom gave me, then we’ll begin checking out “I Can Read” books from the library. We still do TATRAS phonogram charts every day, and alternate every-other-day reading Bob Books and words from the TATRAS lists. I like TATRAS even better after seeing that the Bob Books list some words (like “the” and “a”) as sight words, but which Hans sounded out just fine with his phonics skillz. :) “The” can be said as “THEE” and still be accurate, and “a” can be said “ay” and both are phonetic. Now that Hans has recognized the words from reading them so often, he says them the with the “schwa,” which is simply American “lazy-tongue” (as my professor from my History of the English Language class called it) so it’s a natural evolution.
And, we cannot leave Jaeger out of the chart system, nor does he want to be left out of the phonics bandwagon. So the first page of TATRAS has a “letter recognition” exercise, so I put that up on the fridge with the first phonogram chart of 8 letters (S A L T M I N E), and he is learning the sounds of those letters. When he can correctly name all the letters (which are random and include upper and lower case letters) and give the sounds of the 8 phonograms without prompting, then HE gets to go to ice cream with Daddy. :) Before working with Hans, I give Jaeger the option of working on his page first. Jaeger’s lesson it optional; Hans’ no longer is. So far, however, Jaeger has gleefully done his lesson.
