Hodge-podge of Stuff

First up, I recently discovered ABC Jesus Loves Me which has a nice preschool home school curriculum for FREE if you are looking for a specific plan to follow. We do not follow a regimented curriculum but rather work learning experiences into our everyday fun but the site has great information regarding handwriting. Then, a good friend recently introduced me to I Can Teach My Child. There are lots of fantastic ideas on that site! I combined ideas from these two sites to create our own no fuss handwriting practice.

Jack has found immense enjoyment playing dot to dot on his Ipad. When I saw a post on Christmas sticker letter dot to dots.  I thought that the idea presented a perfect opportunity to capitalize on this new found enjoyment.  It reminded me a little of the handwriting worksheets from  ABC Jesus Loves Me.

So I combined the two ideas....
1.  I used a highlighter and wrote out Jack's name at the top of  a piece of construction paper.
2.  On the bottom of the paper, I used the highlighter to draw three straight lines for Jack to practice.

3.  I used sticker dots to create the start and end dots for the letters of Jack's name.
4.  I used larger stickers to create the start and end points for the straight lines.

and added an idea or two of my own....
5. I put it on a fairly light colored construction paper so bright white or some other bright color would not     cause Jack to turn away from it.
6. I put the "worksheet" on Jack's textured clipboard. Back when Jack was still receiving therapy through our local school system, his vision teacher gave us some textured contact paper that we put on a clipboard creating a textured writing surface to give Jack some sensory feedback when writing/coloring/drawing.
7. I used a fat piece of sidewalk chalk as our writing utensil. We have recently been enjoying chalk drawing together and I was hoping that this activity could be an extension of that.

We traced his sticker dot to sticker dot name hand over hand then we did the first sticker to sticker straight line hand over hand. The other two he did readily without any assistance at all. The entire thing took just a couple of minutes. He did not fuss one little bit and seemed pretty proud of himself when he was all done.

Next up, I had a "how-to" idea of my own. I have been trying to find something to put on Jack's jacket zipper pulls to make them easier for him to hold onto while learn to zip and unzip.

I saw this cute little charm on clearance for $2.

Most jacket zipper pulls have some kind of hole on them somewhere.

I attached the charm to the hole in the zipper pull.

He's still getting the hang of it but at least now hanging on to the zipper is not the problem.


Finally, I leave you with a picture of our favorite kind of "sensory" activity.....

We call it pile o'friends and if you look carefully, Jack is in there!