Three of the hardest words my two kids have learned so far begin with the letter Y.

Can you believe it that both Ben and Becks had trouble calling a yak, a yak; a yacht, a yacht; and yarn, yarn?

They called a yak a yorn; a yacht – yuck; and a ball of yarn, a ball of yet.

Totally hilarious.

This month, we covered the letter Y. We did our tracers, met some woolly yaks, looked at colourful balls of yarn and pretended to sail in a yacht. That got our tongues twisted pretty much.

For the letter Z, we read and reread Rod Campbell’s Dear Zoo. I managed to get the super huge edition of this well-loved book from the Book Depository for 28 bucks, and the kids enjoyed story time with the book and opening the flaps. The book also amused Nat, who’s now 17 months and always ready for a story.

One of the things I am also trying to do as part of our homelearning is to thoroughly exhaust a book by learning as many things as we can from the story, and revisiting it consecutively for at least 3 days to a week. This was something I learned from Chengzhu Mandarin Centre, when Becks attended their holiday programme there last month. With Dear Zoo, I found this set of free printables which included a spot-the-difference activity, a colouring sheet, making a lion mask, a dot-to-dot worksheet and pathways activity sheet. We had lots of fun learning about zoo animals with these activities.

I also made a simple A4 sized “storybook” using powerpoint slides to reinforce the adjectives used to describe each animal that the zoo sent. Becks learnt the beginning sounds of each adjective and animal, while Ben learned how to spell simple words like ‘big’ and ‘tall’, as well as to blend sounds and identify words from the same word family.

We’re moving on to another letter next month, and looking forward to reading another well-loved story about a clumsy giraffe who can’t dance!