Stuck on a project...

Our general lesson plans for now are mainly "categories." Thanks to my good friend Cristi, an experienced homeschool mom, I've decided that it makes more sense to group activities by "what they teach", rather than focus on specific themes (A is for Apple, S is for Snowman, etc.) and keeping it all tied together.  Yes, I do have a Groundhog puzzle planned for tomorrow, and some lovey-dovey hearts for the 14th, but for the most part, there's no "this week is brought to you by  ___" going on. If anything, it's on the surface very chaotic, but I do have a master idea.  Jude seems to have a lot of fine motor struggles, so building these skills up is my main "goal", and learning basics will happen in the process.

The goal is to do each day:
One letter/word identification activity
One math activity
One prewriting/writing activity
One "crafty" something
Story time
Some gross motor activity



 We've been at this a little over a week now, and some great things I've learned:

-Jude can count to 20 (both "out loud" and counting objects).
-he is a whiz at patterns (ABAB, AABB, ABCABC etc.) and shapes
-he is far better at recognizing letters and numbers than I thought. He can't say/sing his ABCs (likely because of his speech issues), but he can pick them out of a crowd.
-he loves craft time, so I've taken to leaving that to the end of our session as motivation to finish his other work.

 I wish I had realized earlier:

-just how badly he struggles with fine motor skills. Isolation of hand vs. arm is rough going.
-that he has a lot of stories crammed in his head.  Maybe it's just being home alone and not having to fight to get a word in sideways, but he's a chatterbox!  His vocabulary is far more extensive than I imagined.
-given an opportunity to take the lead with a project, he's likely to turn it into far more than I expected.


Today, our last project involved stickers and shapes.  I asked him to put the stickers on the shape outlines.  Not only did he outline the shapes, but he "colored" in the rectangle with stickers, drew "his" face on the triangle, and wanted to cut it out/glue to another page to make a body.

Peeling stickers is a real pincher grasp workout.  I was amazed that he peeled off almost 4 sheets' worth of stickers for this. I would have been happy had he done ONE shape, and outline only.

Getting started

He decided to "color in" the shapes

The face HAD to have glasses, just like him.

Smiley Happy Jude!
(The little bit of white space left was colored in "dark blue my favorite"
because there was not allowed to  be any white space.)