File Folder Games to the Rescue!

It might only be our second day of school, but I could tell that Mary needed a break from our usual reading lesson. We're on lesson 52 of Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons; we've been at it for a while now. I could sense some resistance yesterday while working through the lesson, so today I went with a different approach:

Hello, file folder games! The hubs and I put together all of these games a few weeks ago (my sweet mom and brother even helped because it was taking soooo long to laminate and cut-out each piece, but now I think it's totally worth it!) from the site File Folder Fun. I have reading games, math games, and just general preschool games all ready to go in this box. So, instead of doing Lesson 53 in our regular book, we read a couple of the Sonlight readers then played 2 Letter Tulips!

Mary really enjoyed the game, and the quick readers (you can see one on the floor behind her) gave her a little confidence boost. Also, if you've read my previous posts on Calendar Time (here and here), you can tell that I've added the world map to our little area. We were going over our Composer of the Month this morning and Mary correctly named his home country. I thought, "Okay, we need a little bit more with this," so I taped the map up. Tomorrow, I'll show her where Germany is and then ask her to locate it herself on Thursday. And this is just going to have to be it for Calendar Time; I'm not adding another thing. I mean, I don't want to be sitting in the corner of my living room all day! ;)

Mary read the tulips and matched up the words. Quick, painless, fun review. :)

And then, Little Sister wanted in on the action! I'm learning that it can be challenging trying to teach with a toddler, but I'm hoping she's catching a lot of what's being taught to Mary. She's a sweetie, though, so I try to include her as much as I can. However, sometimes fun times can turn into wrestling matches around here:

Do you notice that they're wrestling ON MY GAME!!! Thankfully, I've got some games for Anna prepared, so we pulled one out (after I pulled them off each other) and Mary helped her little sister match up the colors.

Day 2 is not officially over yet, though. We did our basics this morning (Bible, Calendar Time, Reading), and after their rest times (Anna still naps, but Mary sits on her bed and looks at books for an hour) we'll do our Letter of the Week work. I believe Mary gets to use her new Do A Dot markers with some of the activities, so this should be a great afternoon!