Language Work Lately

Nora is just 3 quick months away from turning 4-years-old! It's unbelievable how grown up she seems all of a sudden. It's like every tiny bit of baby has left her. She loves school, and thrives on all the learning she does there! And, we are careful to support that learning here at home! I wanted to share with you some of the ways we have been doing that lately. 

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First, at school, Nora has lots of different work available to her to directly and indirectly work on language (reading and writing) skills. These include:

Since she is in school so often, I don't want to duplicate this exact work here at home. So, we look to see her interests, the areas where she could use some more practice and the areas that she enjoys in order to choose some work at home that supports what she does at Children's House without just doing the exact same thing. 

For Nora, specifically, her interest lately has landed in math, so we keep the language work light and fun. I'm not pushing anything at this age, just exposing her to lots of skills that she will need as she learns to read and write. I would expect her interest in reading will intensify over the next year as she gets older. 

So for now we are still focusing a lot of sounds, sequencing, memory, observation, and classification. These are all skills she will use as she continues more formal academic learning, but are also super fun, and perfect for our Montessori home. To work on these skills we've been: 

• Using rhyming puzzle cards to work on ending sounds 
• Playing sound games with language objects and things we find around the house 
• Using these matching cards for classification work (sorting animals into types or matching them together) and for memory games 
• Talking about these emotions cards. These help with observational skills in addition to the emotion learning. (I wish these cards were with people instead of animals but they work)
• Working with this name puzzle. We identify the sounds {nnnnn-or-u} and start to recognize her name as a whole. 

We also do a ton of reading and lots of art and other fine motor work so she can keep building hand strength, her vocabulary and interest in all things language!

What kind of language work are 3-year-olds working on?