making sentences

School is out for Bee, but school is pretty much what I've been working on for the past couple weeks. We plan to do school at home over the summer. I'm shooting for an hour each day. We have two neighbor girls over for a good part of the summer, so they are on board too. I had intended to start next week when the older girls are out of school, but as soon as they spied their school totes full of stuff, they got pretty excited and wanted to start. For the past two weeks, after they go to school, they come over and we all get started on my school stuff. I love that kids love to learn.


So I have a preschooler (Lou), a kindergartner (Bee), an almost 1st grader and an almost 3rd grader. I was planning on sharing each persons work from each day, but that's a lot to write about. Instead, I'll just share in general the different strategies or activities that we will repeat throughout the summer.

Here's one called 'making sentences.'

This is for the youngest three. We start a sentence together. This is one we tried a few weeks ago just so they could learn how it works.

• We wrote together, "Easter is fun because..."
  
• We read it together and one at a time they completed the sentence.
  
• I wrote the sentence out and I read the sentence to them pointing to each word.
  
• I wrote (or you could type) out the sentence on a sheet of paper.
  
• We cut the words apart.
• They reassembled the sentence, using clues such a capital letters, punctuation, words they know, etc.
• I check it.
  
• They read it to me.
  
• They glued it.
• They read it aloud.
• They illustrated their sentence.
• We reread them all again.

Next time we go to work on a sentence, we will review the past ones as well. After a few of these guys, I will assemble them into booklets with each child in their own booklet.