The Bub in the Belly

Our home learning routine is constantly evolving, so what may have been the case a few months or weeks ago, may no longer be the case today. This is an update on our present routine.

As you would have read from past posts, we did quite a lot of travelling in April, and during that time, we took a break from home learning activities. In fact, we went on a break even before that, because of various reasons. Nevertheless, when I say that we took a break from home learning, I don't mean that we did nothing. It's not possible to do nothing - Ryan is constantly on the go, looking for something to do.

So what has he been up to? Well, Ryan has been spending a lot of time perfecting his reading, spelling, writing, alphabet recognition and phonetic skills. He even picked up the ASL (American Sign Language) for the alphabet after watching a Youtube video a couple of times. In fact, he loves surfing Youtube for videos on phonics. (We monitor his surfing quite closely, he is usually on our laps or right next to us when he is on the iPad.)

We play spelling games all the time. For example, when we're talking to each other - I might tell him the food is hot - and he will spell out the word HOT. When we're at home and he has his mobile letters with him, I will call out words for him to spell, like "Happy Birthday" or "Shining Star" or "Great Job" and he'll use his mobile letters to spell them out. We also use various types of spelling "toys", like the one which I shared on the blog in February (we've since finished all the cards). Here's a new video of him using it.

Apart from the activities related to reading, we are generally doing less of the left brain stuff and focusing on the right brain stuff instead. So we do ESP games, eye training, dots programme, memory games, etc. That actually takes up very little time -  maybe about 15 minutes per day.

We still do a lot of art-related activities, which can be as simple as playing with stickers or more elaborate painting on the easel. There're still a lot of musical activities going on - dancing, singing and playing with toy instruments.

Ryan enjoys a lot of free and unstructured play - eg. pretend play with play dough, free play with blocks, pretend play with toy cars and soft toys, building with Lego, etc. Ryan loves to construct intricate and elaborate structures like the one on the left in the photo below. You can also see in the photo that Ryan has moved on to the blocks on the right - this was immediately after he put in the last piece in the massive structure.:

Ryan makes a new track design EVERY night, without fail.

Here he is playing with stickers, after finishing the construction of the little structure on the table.

I don't know if you noticed the difference but there IS a difference from our last update - we've reverted to our initial approach of "not teaching". This was always our philosophy, right from the start and it worked amazingly well. Only this year, I came up with a small list of things I wanted to teach Ryan because I felt that he was getting bored and that he was ready for more structured teaching. So we spent February and March teaching him various things. He soaked it all up.

In April, as I mentioned above, we took a break and I took the time to review our routine. Ryan was doing really well but I was not really happy with the routine. I wasn't comfortable with it. I knew without a doubt that we needed to revert to our initial philosophy of "not teaching". And so we did. And that's where we are now. Still as busy as ever, but with a different mindset. I'll elaborate in a separate post what I mean by our philosophy of "not teaching", although you can probably guess already.

One thing never changed though, which is that we always let Ryan decide whether to do the activity or not. This was true even when we were "teaching" Ryan stuff in February and March, and it will always be our mantra.