Awesome Letterland

 Letterland is a worldwide program to teach early reading skills, handwriting, spelling, and phonics. Letterland resources has been a heaven-sent to our school. Teaching letters and sounds from rudimentary skills progressing to more complex literary skills has been more exciting as it is a powerful tool. 

Letterland characters make learning the letters fun and interesting. My students can easily remember the letter forms and sounds with this Letterland's unique approach in introducing the letters. The characters make their sounds and their names start with their sounds as well. My students ultimate favorite is Annie Apple who say a, a, a. Letterland uses stories to introduce basic sounds and digraphs. For instance, "ch" sound. Clever Cat belongs to Harry Hat Man who looks after her and she loves him. But there's only one single problem. As soon as she finds herself next to him in a word, Harry's hairy hat makes her nose tickle. So whenever they come together in a word, all you can hear is her sneeze, 'ch..." The children love to say this sound while doing the action trick. For this sound, the children put and index finger  under their noses and pretend to sneeze with a polite ch! Isn't this a smart idea?.

Who would think spelling could be fune engaging? With Live Spelling, every one can join in and engage in our spelling drills. This is done by handing out picture cards to the children and the teacher says a word to spell. The children repeat the word and decide who has the letters needed to build the word.

We are also enjoying our Letterland Living ABC software. It presents animated characters to develop phonemic awareness and language development. It features alphabet songs and handwriting songs to teach children the right strokes and directionality of letter formation without tears. When my son started to learn how to write letters, he was struggling. But then, when I started singing the handwriting song for a particular letter, he started to show an "ah-huh!" expression on his face. It gave him a hint on how to write the letters. For beginners, they can enjoy finger tracing the letters to before they can actually write the letters. To write letter the lower case  Dd, the song goes like this... 

Dippy Duck

Draw Dippy Duck's back.

Go round her tum.

Go up to her head.

Then down you come!

The songs -alphabet songs and handwriting songs are very catchy. You can find the kids singing all day long:)

Letterland also offers guide books which is useful and offers practical advice on how to help children to learn to read and write. Parents will understand how the program runs by introducing them to phonics and different stages of literacy. 

Letterland  program has a lot of fun craft ideas and cooking too. Crafts and physical activities enable them to remember the letter formation and sounds even better as it is simply so much fun! 

I can keep going on what Letterland can offer and it is endless. I believe that  one of the best gifts I can ever give to my students is to impart the love for reading as we journey together to Letterland.

Firefighter Fred 

Sammy Snake

Lucy Lamp Light

ZigZag Zebra

Beach Theme

Wow!  Summer is here! My class has been studying about Beach and Sandcastle. This theme has brought us to the world of imagination. I prepared lots of exciting activities linking to this theme and every child displays excitement to their heart's content:)  Here are pictures of some of our beach fun  activities . We have a lot of writing too which encourage their imagination.

Who can stop the kids from digging in our sensory tub? This play is an important part of their growth. This week we have sand , shell and stones in our sensory tub. The children explore and learn about the world as they get their hands in to the sand tub. They are thrilled of sensory play but usually adults tend to dread it. This can be messy and daunting for adults but the learning experience sensory play offers is endless. Sensory play allows the children to use their five senses to touch and manipulate things around them.

Let's keep a piece of the beach by making this crafty summer keepsake made from seashell. Last week I went for a weekend getaway and collected some shells by the shore. 

My little budding jewelers created wearable art using shells, string and beads.  

I love watching the waves back and forth, splashing  and tumbling shells along the beach line. The sound of the waves na d the sway of water is refreshing and soothing and therapeutic at the same time. Oh how I love to walk along the beach. Be mesmerize by our beach in a bottle Science activity. This activity creates an ocean in a bottle with waves which looks so magical for the children. We used empty plasctic bottle, crushed seashells, sand and food coloring for the blue water. This ocean in a bottle mimics the tidal patterns of the real ocean.   

 We pushed ourselves to a higher level of writing this summer school. We have writing activities to stimulate conversation, provoke discussion and extend imagination. We have writing prompts which serve as an inspiration to spark creative writing:) 

The above worksheets are available at http://www.kidsparkz.com

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Embrace our Summer School

So it's summer once again and here at FOSCO International School, we offer the best summer school experience to every kid who joins us. We opened our summer school with a warm welcome enveloped with fun activities to make each child excited. We had mascots to welcome our guests, parents and children. We set up various kinds of stations where everybody was free to roam around and visit each station. We had face painting, tattoo, balloon barbecue, clay play, basketball, and popcorn station.You can hear children laughing, giggling and singing as they spent an hour of activities and a chance to intermingle.

I'm extremely excited about summer school this year. We have new ideas in our program which engage our students to acquire skills they need for real-life contexts. We are getting techie as we explore take on our Media subject. Our Drama class will surely make this summer experience more dramatic as students observe their environment and respond, using elements of theatre. The also observe formal and informal works of theatre, film/video, and electronic media and respond, using the vocabulary of theatre. And also,students observe their environment and respond, using elements of theatre. The also observe formal and informal works of theatre, film, video, and electronic media and respond, using the vocabulary of theatre.We also have an hour per week to teach other classes with anything we want. Some teachers teach photography, Montessori Practical Life Skills, making class blogs, arts and crafts and so much more. 

This is just our second week and we still have so much in our bags.