Farm Animals' Wheel

Last Saturday morning, as part of the farm animals theme, I made a small wheel for Little Bee to work on. I encouraged her to think of 8 farm animals to write in the wheel, and she was able to independently list down all but 2 farm animals (horse and goat). 

 

The wheel with 8 farm animals. Little Bee copy-wrote the names of the animals, except for "pig", "cat" and "dog" which she wrote herself without any assistance from me.

It was enlivening to see her furrowing her little brows and thinking hard about what farm animals to list down (although I did use helping terms like "perhaps the next animal is a lion? a bear?" just to reinforce the difference between farm and forest/safari animals). 

I was pleasantly surprised that she could spell out "pig", "dog" and "cat" by herself, probably due to the crafts she did which usually comprised of writing down the names of the animals she worked on.

She was thrilled when we completed the wheel and "sealed" it with a bronze fastener. We turned the wheel around and she read the words eagerly, treating this like a game, and reinforcing her whole-word recognition of these words. We took around 20 minutes to complete this wheel.

Little Bee loves her farm animals wheel. She wrote the words "Farm" and I wanted her to write "animals" but she told me the word was too long, and she was too tired! Ha!

She can now recognise quite a lot of sight words, all thanks to the Peter and Jane Key Word series that she loves. I stopped teaching her phonics these days, as I prefer the Bees to learn reading by understanding the meaning and appreciating the beauty of language (like us in the good old days!). I have full faith in the whole-word recognition as Big Bee and us learned to read ardently through that method.

All dressed up and acting coy, in preparation for a Children's Day party in school! 

Through thematic homelearning and daily reading of books borrowed from school, she is now expanding her reading vocabulary slowly, and could read simple books with short sentences by herself. I do hope she will turn out to be an avid reader like the rest of our family as well :)

After the wheel craft, she took the remaining pink paper, snipped around and created this beautiful flower all by herself, which she insisted I must use another of her favourite fastener to attach the stem. She told me she learned this from the TV series "Kailan" and was able to replicate it quite well.