Learning about J

I recently remarked to Olie that I was stressing myself out because I had embarked on a somewhat ambitious scrapbooking project and some other little projects for the twins. And since it was all my idea, I took full responsibility for the stress it put on me. Her response was that perhaps I just liked the feeling of doing projects and accomplishing them. Perhaps.

Anyway, one of the little projects I decided to do was to create a lapbook each for Evan and Jordan. I discovered lap books from a fellow mom sometime ago but felt they were far too academic for activities that I was going to do with the twins. But recently, they've been coming home from school asking to do more 'academic' things like colouring and 'writing' Chinese strokes.

So, I decided to create a little book of activity for each of them. I liked that idea because the alternative was to have pieces of paper strewn all over the place. The next big problem was of content. What to put into it? The easiest, I felt was to do an alphabet one and rather than start with "A", I would make them an alphabet lap book based on the letter of their names. So Jordan got a "J" book and Evan got an "E" book.

It took a bit of planning and a lot of deciding what to include. But since it was going to be my first attempt, I wanted it simple.

I decided it had to have

1. The letter their name began with, for them to colour and scrawl.












2. Foam parts that when put together, built the letter.














3. Words and corresponding pictures that began with the letter in question. For Jordan, she got Jesus, Jam, Juice, Jelly, Japan, Jellyfish and Juggling. The pictures appeared on a large laminated sheet and a similar picture was cut, put on hard cardboard, laminated and had double sided tape attached to the back for her to play mix and match. When she's a little bit older, I'm going to get her to make up a story with the words. Jesus had jam and juice for breakfast in Japan. After that, he decided to juggle with some jelly fish.












To show her juggling, I took two rubber balls out and juggled for her. After that, she was more intent at trying to juggle than finish her puzzle.

4. There had to be a corresponding story. I wanted a story that the twins were familiar with, had some action and a story they could get behind. Currently, one of their favourite stories is Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed. So, we had 5 individually laminated monkeys that could be attached onto the bed, detached and lain quite pathetically on the ground and a little girl who could bellow in at the right times "NO MORE MONKEYS JUMPING ON THE BED!"













Everything was prettily laminated so that it wasn't a 'one-time' activity.

Of course, there was also 'by the way' learning where she had to count and basically subtract the monkeys that were left jumping on the bed.

I call it by the way learning because I did not set out to use these activities to intently teach them math or rote learn their alphabets. I created these activities so that they could have fun, wouldn't drive me up the wall and perhaps pick up a thing or two from it. Basically, there wasn't going to be a test after they finished playing with the activities.

All in all, it took her most of the morning to do everything with numerous breaks where she went off her merry way to do other things. It was a great set of activities for her to do since she was down with a high fever and couldn't go out to play.

Evan has a similar book and had an equal amount of fun doing it at a different time. But because when he was doing it, Jordan was around too and I had to stop her from showing off, I couldn't take any photos of him with him learning all about E!

Technorati Tags: twins, learning