Letter A...

If you are anything like me and spend a good amount of the night (obviously in that mommy downtime) on Pinterest, then you have probably seen letter of the week or even letter of the day based activities. That is exactly the route we have chosen to go and here is why: they are fun and I feel learning, especially for toddlers has to be fun or they just won't retain it. They can also be as simple or complex as you want them to be and can insanely creative, they also help involve a large range of different ideas into your lesson plans. Starting off our letter of the week miniature units is you guessed it, the letter A.

Our week usually kicks off with a page out of our workbooks that we mentioned earlier on this blog, if you missed it you can catch it here. The workbook we have mainly focuses on tracing the letter, then writing the letter itself, and then recognizing objects/words that start with that letter. It has small activities to go with certain letters, like coloring by letters or matching objects.

During the week we continue practicing writing our capital and lowercase A's on the dry erase board we have. We continue to use simple games during the week to strengthen his recognition of the letter, here are some of our favorite weekly rotations:

Using our Melissa and Doug magnetic letter set, this set has both uppercase and lowercase letters. A few simple ideas for using the magnetic letters in a fun way is putting them in a shallow tub with rice, it turns it into a searching game and once they find the letter they can pair them with their lowercase or uppercase partner. We also set all the magnets out on our floor and have our preschooler find the uppercase and lowercase set of A's.

Another great activity is to get two small bins or bowls and label one with a capital A and the other with a lowercase a. You can then make a handful of small cards that have either of the letter's on them and have your own preschooler sort them into the appropriate bins. A few other simple ideas would be to make your own letter search on a piece of paper, have your child circle all the hidden A's they can find. You can also make a list with your preschoolers help of all the animals, plants, foods, etc. Alongside these simple do it yourself activities we like to do a craft out of the letter itself to get a little bit of arts and crafts into our week. This week we made:

Alligator for our capital A.

Apple for our lowercase a.

 

We also incorporate a bible lesson that goes along with the letter we are focusing on, this week we learned about Noah's Ark with our preschool bible and thanks to Bible for Kids app we have on our Kindle tablet. It made the story interactive which made it easier for our son to retain what he was leaning. After the bible lesson was such a hit we decided to create our own Ark's to tie in the lesson altogether and talked about all the sets of animals that we were going to put onto our Ark's, with a great emphasis on animals that started with the letter A.

 

 





I cannot emphasize this enough: use your communities resources for adding to your own homeschool routine during the week. We like to utilize our local library by attending story time and using our own library card to check out books that fall into our letter of the week category. I don't know about you ,but my toddler loves the responsibility of checking out library books and returning them at the end of our week. At the end of our week we complete our lesson by adding our A to our very own Chicka Chicka Boom Boom tree.