When I was a brand new homeschooler, a friend of mine suggested I take a look at First Language Lessons for the Well-Trained Mind (Volume 1 & 2) to use with my five year old son. She loaned me her copy to look over, and shortly after I purchased my own copy. After looking on the internet, I found some printables to go along with this volume over at Homeschool Creations. We have been using the book for the past couple of weeks, and so far I really like it. What I love is that my five year old is picking up on things, but it's also a great review for my nine year old daughter when she listens in to our lessons. Homeschooling is great like that!

This week I noticed that my son was constantly pointing out nouns to me - and yes, he was pointing out pretty much everything! He gets the distinction between common and proper nouns as well. When I needed a chunk of quiet time to read aloud with my daughter, I had my son do an activity to solidify this concept.

I'm sure you have lots of these around your house (I save them for these occasions):

I told my son to cut out pictures of nouns.... and he came up with a lot of things to cut out! All on his own he went to the costume catalog and starting cutting out pictures of super heroes. "Here are a bunch of proper nouns, mom!" I was so happy to hear him make the distinction on his own.

I gave him a couple pieces of paper, a glue stick and wrote "Common Nouns" on one piece of paper and "Proper Nouns" on the other piece. He arranged them all very carefully before he glued (he's my type A child):

After about 30 minutes he had completed his work:

Without any effort, he has also memorized the poem "The Caterpillar" by Christina Rosetti (also in the book). We didn't even work on it; we just repeated each day during our lesson and all of a sudden he knew it. I haven't yet read The Well Trained Mind by Susan Wise Bauer, but I have it reserved at our local library and can't wait until it gets here!

It struck me today not only how much I have yet to learn about this thing called homeschooling, but also just how blessed I am to have the opportunity to learn!