Month 1, Week 1: All about A...

Hello everybody! We just wrapped up our first official week back and while we unfortunately caught the flu bug that has been going around lately, our school year is still off to a great start! Let's begin with going over some of our big changes this year! We have switched to a monthly planned curriculum that I break down week by week, we have condensed our learning to only 4 days a week this year, and have chosen to widen our learning outside of just a basic alphabet theme. We still implement games, crafts, and letter of the week learning. We still use a variety of workbooks to really help our preschooler with his learning and we still do extra curricular activities as part of our learning. With all that said let's get started with our first week back!

This week we have been learning all about the letter A, the number 1, circles, and the colors red and green. And putting our focus onto bible lessons that went along with our learning themes this year. This weeks bible verses were: "I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made" Psalm 139:14  which we focused on the first half of our week with our all about me theme and "He shielded him and cared for him; he guarded him as the apple of his eye" Deuteronomy 32:10 which we focused on the other half of our week with our apple themes. We have previously made a letter of the week bible themed craft that you can find here. At the beginning of each week I give our preschooler a preview of what is in store for us learning wise throughout our week by writing down our week's learning goals on our whiteboard. We try to fit in each day with a physical activity that ranges from yoga to running or swimming, a music hour where we listen to or create our own music, and multiple reading times to break up our day.

We kicked off this week with a fun "All About Me" activity booklet that I came across on Pinterest, you can print your own booklet out here. This was just a fun way for our preschooler to describe himself and even learn a little about his own self. We used a mirror for this activity so he could look for himself and discover his eye color, hair, and even count his teeth. To go along with our all about me theme for the day, we also filled out a first day of school questionnaire that you can print out here. This was just a fun activity to see how our preschooler would answer the questions and to use as a keepsake to compare with answers from next year. Keeping along with our all about me theme we worked on some name recognition activities: we had a letter building worksheet, a name puzzle, and a matching game with clothespins. If you are wanting to do a letter of the week craft, you can find ours here from our previous year here.

 

A simple name chart, each line he practices writing another letter of his name until he gets to the bottom and writes his complete name.

 Here you can see our preschooler doing a simple name puzzle that we made.

Here we used his name on cardstock and had written the corresponding letters on clothespins that he had to find and clip onto the correct letter.

 

Moving onto the rest of the week we began focus with letter A worksheets out of some of our preschool workbooks. Since this is Fall we will be incorporating many fall and apple themed activities into our learning. Our first craft back fell perfectly into both themes with coffee filter apples! These are an easy prep for us homeschooling parents, all I did was cut out a basic apple shape from construction paper (you will need 2 pieces cut out identically) and then cut out the middle part of the apple for the coffee filter to be placed there. Next you let your toddlers go wild with markers on a coffee filter, when they are done transfer them to a plate and spray with water from a spray bottle. Once the filters are dry you can glue them between the two pieces of construction paper and there you have one coffee filter apple!

 

 

We moved onto a fun numbers game with the help of a simple construction paper tree we had made and some red pom poms we had on hand. You can use this activity however you want, we used it to work on following directions, counting, and recognizing circles. I would simply have our preschooler add or subtract a said amount of pom pom apples and then count how many we still had left on our trees. Our son didn't stop at just this activity, he continued to play with it throughout the rest of our week.

 

 

After a quick park date with some friends we finished the rest of the week with an apple taste testing activity, we picked up a couple varities of apples from our local market and printed out a little worksheet to go along with our tasting that you can find here. Since we already had apples sliced in halves for our taste testing, it only made sense to follow that activity with a parts of an apple recognition activity.

 

 

With so many leftover apples, this gave our preschooler a chance to practice some Montessori life skills by learning to use a knife to cut up apples. We stuck with a simple butter knife that we had on hand and I left the rest up to our son. After a simple demonstration of how I used the knife, I then let him take over and when he finished we used the apple chunks for some delicious apple muffins. We followed our muffin making session with a trip to our local library for preschool story time!

 

 

To wrap up our week we took the opportunity to head to our local library to check out some books for next week. Here are some books we loved this week:

 

 

Thanks to our little trip to the local library we were able to turn it into a nature walk on the way home and collect objects that were related to Fall, like acorns, colorful leaves, and an apple from our neighbors tree. We hope you all had a great kick off to your new school years and look forward to connecting back next week with all of you! Check back for another week filled with craft, games, and some new learning ideas based on the letter B!