Inclusion - Teaching to the Family not just the individual

With Tristan in first grade and Annaliese in kindergarten and one more child added to the mix school has definitely become more interesting this year! So we change. With life you can never stay the same. Honestly to stay the same would be incredibly boring and very frustrating (I have tried before and it didn't work)! So we keep moving and keep changing as we need to. So here are a few things we have been doing with school lately. I am including everyone more and more in the activities we do if not there are more messes than I care to deal with and more crying than I can handle and a super frustrated mom! So I have changed and it is working...for now :) One activity we do for math on a regular basis is Mom's Shop. We do a lot with this and everyone is working on a different skill. For Gavin he is working on identifying the coins by hearing the name and pointing to it and matching the picture of the coin he needs to use to buy something. Annaliese is working on knowing the names of the coins and the values and Finn is working on using his words and manners. Tristan is working on adding and subtracting and substituting coins that have equal value! This makes everyone happy. I sometimes add special things to moms shop, but the way that we do it most of the time is for the kids to buy their 10am snack! They love having a choice and I love that they are learning. You can see we use a window and I sit on one side of the window and the kids on the other side and AMAZINGLY it turns into MOMS SHOP and the kids think it is so much fun and so do I!

Another thing we do is we use laminated letter cards for different games. One is a hopscotch type of game where they hop from letter to letter saying the sound or blending a word or saying the letter name. Finn just has fun! Gavin is learning letter names and basic identification. Annaliese is learning sounds and works on blending. They love this game. Then we take the same cards and the kids are timed and crawl on their knees to identify the answer to a question I will give them and touch the answer with a bat. An example of a question is what letter says ____ or touch the letter a ____ or spell the sounds ac etc.... Pictures will hopefully help give you a better idea of what I put into words.

The last thing that you will see a picture of that we recently did was learning the letter H. It was cool enough where we could all say the sound of h on the window and cause it fog up. Finn just fogged up the window and made it dirty. Gavin said the sound and fogged up the window and made it dirty. Annaliese said the letter the sound and wrote the letter on the fog and made the window dirty!

As you can see we are just trying to include everyone in some way and it makes every one happy, especially me!

And in the picture where Gavin and Finn are crawling through the window...sometimes we do make it window day. We don't use the door only the window...even me!