Yesterday I
tried to work on a worksheet with my little guy, just for fun, to give him some
“work” to do. He is almost 5, and can do
lots of things already like write, spell his name, count, and he knows a lot of
signs in ASL (American Sign Language).
The
objective of the worksheet was to color code the pictures based on the letter
the picture began with. For example, if
the picture began with “w”, you colored the picture brown. If it began with “d”, you colored it
yellow. If it began with “r”, you colored
it orange.
For my son,
this was confusing. Watermelon was one
of the pictures he was supposed to color brown.
I could sense what was going on in his mind. A watermelon is pink and green. A donut was one of the pictures you were
supposed to color yellow. Donuts
definitely are not yellow. They are
brown, so we should be coloring that picture brown and not the watermelon. A rainbow was one of the pictures he was
supposed to color orange. A rainbow
isn’t orange. It is red, orange, yellow,
green, blue, and purple. He knows
that. He has seen a lot of them in
person because we lived in Hawaii for a few years.
He ended up
not coloring the pictures. We still went
through all of them to identify beginning letter sounds, but he didn’t want to
color the pictures. I really didn’t
blame him and didn’t make him do it.
It seemed
like the point of this particular worksheet, which was to teach beginning
letter sounds, was diminished by the instructions. In the end, the main focus of the activity
was whether or not the learner could follow instructions.
There are so
many other ways that this skill could be taught to your homeschooler in a
natural manner. My son was already
familiar with many of the pictures, because he had seen them in real life,
learned about them in literature or movies, or learned how to sign the word in
ASL. Some of the word included other
than the ones I have already mentioned were wagon, duck, rug, robot, door, and
web.
Some simple
ideas for learning beginning letter sounds with the above objects could include
taking a ride in a wagon. You could have
a conversation with your child about the wagon, about the beginning letter and
teach them the ASL sign, which looks like the letter all in a very short
ride. To continue with the letter w, you
could observe and draw a spider web, most likely during the spring and
summer. (Later in the day, he was
actually trying to teach his older sister how to draw a spider web.) This
activity would overlap into science.
There are so many hands-on activities that you could do that would help
your child connect with and retain beginning letter sounds better than a
confusing worksheet.
Just a note,
I am not completely against the use of worksheets. It is fun sometimes to sit down and answer
questions about what we know. I like to
take tests. However, I don’t believe
that worksheets should be used as a teaching tool. The object is to help the child learn and
retain this information, and that is best accomplished by helping them connect
with the information.
I hope I
have given you some simple ideas on how to teach your homeschooler using real world scenarios, and
critical thinking about using worksheets as a teaching tool.
Many
blessings to you and I hope you enjoy your journey!
