Making a Good Case (Kindergarten Readiness Test #2)

The most common thing you hear about summer as it relates to kiddies it that they forget a huge portion (usually said to be half, but that can’t be true, can it?) of what they learn all year over the summer. So every so often we do something to spark what we learned all year.

We do lots of little things, integrated into our fun time like:

   ü  When we’re in the pool we talk about whether our toys or ourselves are more or less dense than  the water.

   ü  When we’re on a roadtrip we talk about how far we are from where we are going (whether I plan to or not) and what state we are in and which states touch it, or start with the same letter, or are bigger or smaller than the one we are in.

   ü  When we have snacks we try to count how many we have or do the math problems of we started with x and we ate y so how many should we have left?

   ü  We always read.

Stuff like that.

As my planning turns from Summer plans, which are in the execution phase, to Fall plans and back-to-school shopping, I start thinking about that old Kindergarten Readiness Test (KRT) again. As such I realized that while we work on letters (sounds, writing, and recognition) often, I have never made a point to differentiate the upper and lower case letters. I use them interchangeably and so do my girls.  In the KRT, the kids do have to distinguish between upper- and lower-case letters, so we talk about them today.

Part One:

The first thing I do is to write out the names of the family members on a piece of paper and ask the kids what is different.

They recognize the different words and both girls read the paper to say “mommy mommy briana briana abigail abigail daddy daddy”. I ask my question differently. “Are the words on the left side of the paper different than the words on the right side of the paper?” They scrutinize the words.  They notice that the first mommy has a silly curly y and that the words on the left are written smaller than the ones on the right but make no mention of letter case.

When I tell them that the words on the left are in lowercase and the ones on the right are in uppercase, everyone says “Oh. I knew that.” But then Briana asks “what does uppercase mean?”

I explain that uppercase and lowercase letters are used to clarify what you mean when you are writing. There are lots of rules when you get into writing more and you will need to know when to use uppercase and when to use lowercase letters. For example, when you start a new sentence you start the first word with an uppercase letter.  You also use uppercase for the first letter of names. 

“That’s called capitals.” I’m told from Briana.

I tell her that another word for capitals is uppercase. Now, if in that KRT, they use either word, she’ll know what they mean.

Briana is very into traceable letters right now and wants to do upper- and lower-case traceable letters.  I write a page of uppercase As and another page of lowercase a’s for each girl in dashed lines and the girls trace them to make the letters.  I tend to hide words or letters in there just to see if they are paying attention as they trace, so into a row of lowercase a’s I add a smiley face. Briana catches it and then has to go back and add faces and hair adornments to all of hers.

Then we do B’s and the rest of the letters in the girls’ names.  Luckily for me Briana and Abigail have a lot of letters in common.

Since I do not want to spend another (yes, another! I told you Bree loves traceable letters) day writing out pages of letters, I move us to part two.

Part Two:

Part two is a similar activity done in a more fun way.

I get two old Tupperware trays and fill them with flour.  In today’s case, I accidentally bought the flour with salt added and cannot cook with it because I am a terrible chef and adjusting recipes just doesn’t work out for me. I figure this is a good way to make use of that flour.

I ask the girls to make me a lowercase "a" with their fingers. 

Then I ask them to shake the flour until it’s smooth and make me an uppercase "F".  We do this for about an hour. The game escalates into spelling out small words in lower or uppercase.

The nice thing is that as we did this we discovered a couple of letters that are difficult for the kids to make like Ks, or differentiate like lowercase qs versus gs, and then we worked on those for a while and I helped out until they got it.

Then we worked on penmanship by using straws as a writing implement in the flour.

We made shapes, letters, and numbers.

By the way, this blog is brought to you by the wonderful people of Molly Maids, without whom we would never have been able to do this wonderful activity indoors.

After long, hot showers we curled up on the couch to watch ‘Here Come the ABCs’ by  

They Might Be Giants. It’s a DVD (and a CD) that both of my kids are crazy about and has lots of fun songs about letters with really basic animation of the letters.  I thought that the kids would have long since gotten sick of this video when they saw the high energy graphics of ‘Go! Diego, Go!’ and ‘Team Umizoomi’, but they haven’t. If you have toddlers or preschoolers, I highly recommend it. The video is quite bizarre, but the songs are great.

Here’s a link directly to the video on Amazon:

Now, my girls can build a great case. A good thing since this week they both want to be lawyers when they grow up.

<3 Pedigreed Housewife