The Ks of my life

I decided to be thrify and made my own pocket chart. The total cost? Less than $5 in all, and it takes less than half an hour.

How to do it?

First, get a thick colored cardboard.

Then, determine the size of the pockets (depending on what you want to slot in) and cut some firm plastic sheets accordingly.

Finally, stick the plastic sheets on the board and secure them. There you go, all done in 3 simple steps.

After attending Jann's class, I was excited to get something going with K. Upon much consideration, I decided to do the following activity with him.

Why did I start with alphabet C? Because I can find more objects at home beginning with alphabet C. Haha.

Here's what we did:

I prepared the box as follows:


I held the box and sang to the tune of the magic box (which is what we do at JG), then I got K to tap the box.

I showed K the flashcard and read it to him. Then, I pronouned the phonetic sound for him. (I started with lowercase as that is more frequently seen in books etc)

After that, he took the objects out of the box one by one as I identified them respectively. As his mood was pretty good that night, I extended the activity a little by writing down the words as well. Then, we traced the alphabet using his Montessori sandpaper letters.

To end off, I gave him a candy from the box.

I repeated the same activity the following night and replaced some objects. K was elated when he saw cheese.

The whole activity didn't take us longer than 15 minutes. Depending on the age/ attention span of your child, you may consider adjusting the number of objects accordingly.

Needless to say, one of our bedtime reads those nights included one of his favourite book -  "The hungry caterpilar". Will be sharing more on reading tips shortly, stay tuned!

Don't under-estimate a piece of paper.


We can do quite a few things with this. First, I told K this is a purple square. We each held a piece of the paper. (I used the same color for both of us so as not to distract him)

Then, we folded it. There, it becomes a rectangle.


Unfold and fold it again, there you go, a triangle.



And finally, I folded him a crane :)

For older kids, you can try cutting them into shapes like circle and stars.

In an attempt to teach K colors, we did this over the weekend.

It’s very simple actually. All he has to do is to pick up the colored pom poms and sort them according to the colored plates.

We had some fun sorting them out initially. Later on, he was more interested in stuffing them into his mouth. They must have looked like delicious candies to him. Haha. 

For older kids, you can increase the difficulty by introducing more colors or getting them to pick using a pair of tongs.