It’s been a simple affair with the letter G. We did mostly good ol’ tracing. A lot of tracing and practicing, in fact; cos’ the letter’s been tough to conquer for both the upper and lowercase.

We also drew a giraffe with the Dot to Dot activity sheet for Dear Zoo, and met the most lovable giraffe called Gerald!

Giraffes Can’t Dance is an awesome book about Gerald the Giraffe, with rhymes aplenty, examples of alliteration, descriptions of movements and a beautiful lesson about finding your own rhythm to dance to your own tune. The kids also learned the difference between laughing with someone and laughing at someone and the importance of empathy. They love the book so much, they make me read it to them again and again.

For a counting exercise, I gave Ben and Becks some round labels I bought from Popular Bookstore and got them to arrange a bunch of grapes in descending order, beginning with 6 grapes. They had fun watching the circles “transform” into their favourite fruit. To complete the exercise, Becks learned to count to 20 and Ben learned simple addition.

G’s been a golly good letter to learn. We’ll be moving on to the letter S in September, and reading two more exciting books!

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!

We naturally assume that we should begin with the letter ‘A’ when teaching our kids the letters of the alphabet. I certainly did, and since I stayed home in March, we’ve covered the letters ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’, ‘D’, ‘E‘ and ‘F’.

In the book, The Art of Teaching Reading, by Lucy McCormick Calkins, she suggests that the easiest letter to learn is the first initial of your child’s first name. She then goes on to recommend teaching the letter ‘M’ next. Her reason? The name of the letter contains its sound, we can stretch out the M sound without necessarily making sounds that don’t belong to that letter; plus, the uppercase and lowercase are almost the same. I learned this whilst reading an e-book titled I Can Teach My Child to Read: A 10-Step Guide for Parents by Jenae Jacobson, who quoted Calkins, when she shared how to introduce simple phonic rules to kids.

So since I’ve already covered the letter ‘B’ with Ben, I skipped several letters of alphabet line and explored the letter M with the kids last month.

Apart from our usual tracers (you can find some free printables for the letter M here, here and here), which they found extremely easy to do, and learning the sound of the letter (as sung by Pig in Word World) by going Mmm..mmm… Milk, we practised our pincer grip with M&M’s

And made lots of music last month with the keyboard and xylophone.

I wanted to train the kids to sing in tune so I introduced them to the notes C, D and E. We spent the whole month tuning our pitch and learning to sing the notes accurately whenever we played them on musical instruments. Trust me, this has to be taught and repeated till it becomes second nature for the kids to sing their do-re-mis at the correct pitch. They actually need to be trained to listen closely so they can assign the right musical tones to their relative positions on the scale – in this case, the Middle C, D and E.

And that was all there was for us for the letter M! A pity we had to miss the whole Children’s Season thing at the museums because of the haze, but we’ll definitely revisit this letter at the museums next year!