Coloring and Cutting

Today, Joe wanted to cut paper and Jake wanted to color.

I set Jake up with crayons and a coloring book.

Then, I handed Joe the scissors and a piece of paper and he started to cut strips and tiny pieces of confetti that blew all over the table and floor

After awhile, he said he wanted to cut letters. I got another piece of paper out and started to draw letters for him to cut.

Then, I remembered the templates I had for the Bob Books.

I handed the word search template to him and asked him to find and cut out each word.

He was able to find most of the words and at first, he was cutting out the whole word. But then, he started to cut out the individual letters.

“No Joe, cut out the whole word–”

Wait a minute. Wait just one minute.

I got the tape out.

“Here you go! You can cut out the letters and tape them together to make the word!”

He liked that because he got to use scissors and tape.

He looked at the word, cut out the letters and put them together to make the word…like a puzzle.

Again, I let him lead.

He wanted to cut paper. We made it into a learning activity. We worked on fine motor skills with the scissors, reading with the words and problem solving with the puzzle.

We made learning fun.

At the end, we put the words into sentences.

This was a little more challenging for him. Next time, I will get the Bob Books out and have him see and sort the words into the sentence.

For the past three days we have worked on the same words from the same books.

The activities for the past two days were both impromptu, fun and surprising and he’s starting to recognize words by sight.

We’ve started the road to reading.