Learning At Home: Transportation

We delved into the world of transportation this month. Because the 2 darlings were down with stomach flu for almost 2 weeks, I could not complete the ambitious lesson plan I had drawn up for this theme nor go for any field trips. 

However, we tried to cover as much ground to understand all kinds of transportation and had great fun playing and learning! I also included a fair amount of "academic" work on writing, letter recognition and math to prepare Little Bee for N2 next year. 

Featured books that Little Bee really enjoyed:

Go Maisy Go! (highly recommended as my 2 girls really love this book with lots of flaps to explore!)

The Bus Stop (a fantastic book to initiate Little Bee to start taking the school bus to school!)

Key song: 

Wheels on the bus/wheels on the bike

Games: 

There are plenty of fun games for transportation. Little Bee's favourite is to line several chairs together to form a bus or train, then she will be the bus driver to drive Big Bee and myself to familiar destinations like the zoo, market, school, etc. The standard bus fee that she charges is always $2! 

Video: 

We watched a series of Hi5 videos that featured all sorts of transportation, which really helped to reinforce the theme! It is also a good reprieve for me - where I can "teach" (and rest!) through the TV! 

Craftwork:

Little Bee created a train from 4 recycled toilet rolls, and had real fun choosing and painting different colours for each carriage. This is really good for teaching colours.

 

Choo choo train! 

We also created a "monster truck", using 2 paper plates to form gigantic wheels. I also wrote out the word "TRUCK" which she was able to spell aloud while looking at the word. 

The truck is almost the same size as petite Little Bee!

Little Bee also learned about the circle shape and colours when she created a hot air balloon using construction paper, cardboard and some yarn. 

Up up and away!!

Fine motor skills and writing

I got Little Bee to assemble the components of this car together, and I wrote down CAR for her to copywrite without dots or tracing line. She wrote down CAR on her own, just by emulating the word that I wrote. She was very pleased with herself after writing the word and kept reiterating "C for Car" the entire evening!

I also printed out an alphabet train for her to learn writing through tracing as well as to recognise the "small" letters. She was not patient enough to complete all the letters, so more work needs to be done to hone her concentration skills! 

Letter recognition: "C"

I decided to let Little Bee have a try at a word search game, not confident that she will have sufficient attention span to complete the exercise. I was very heartened when she showed much interest in this game (probably because it was her first time!) and even circled all the letters "c" with no assistance from me! When she circled one "c" successfully, I will clap my hands and encouraged her to find another "c". She would usually furrow her cute little brows and asked me, "Where? Where's c?". Without telling her where the letter was, she was able to pore over the exercise carefully to find all the hidden letters.

Math: Counting to "6"

I developed this little counting game for her to count to 6 and also to link the school bus concept to her new schooling experience. She can effectively count to 18 now, but I want her to recognise the numbers and match objects to the numbers by herself. She was able to do this exercise with a little help from me. She thoroughly enjoyed this, and kept associating the little faces to herself, jie-jie and us, so she will plan where we should all be sitting in the school bus!

Big Bee as teacher!

Big Bee had stopped participating in craftwork as she prefers more "big girl" (and cool) activities like reading and playing computer games. But I got her interested in becoming Little Bee's teacher, so we planned a couple of learning games together. 

Here is one of them. Big Bee drew a landscape depicting the 4 modes of transport and we got Little Bee to match each transportation vehicle to the respective mode of transport, eg car is to road, train is to track. Little Bee was able to do this without prompting from us, and it was really heartwarming when Big Bee giggled and smiled with huge satisfaction after Little Bee completed the exercise. Now I have an able teaching assistant in Big Bee! 

I also tried to involve Big Bee as often as possible, to broaden her general knowledge, though I usually let her choose what to do. She created this sailboat out of paper and a pencil one fine morning. 

I also taught her the various road signs and their meanings when the Bees were playing with transportation-themed lego pieces. So, these days, when we are on the road, Big Bee will point out the road signs and tell us what to do! 

There are still lots of things to learn under this theme, but it is time to move on to yet another theme!