Month 2, Week 2: All about the letter E and F

This week we are still learning all about the colors: orange and black, squares, the number two and are changing up our normal schedule a bit by learning two letters this week! Yes, two letters this week and I know what you are probably thinking ,but have no fear it can easily be done! The letters E and F are so similar it made sense with our upcoming traveling that we use this opportunity to add in this extra letter now. This months theme of everything October has to be our favorite so far, our toddlers are loving it and we are enjoying all the creative learning ideas that tie into this month. Like most weeks we kicked off this week with an updated white board reflecting what we will be covering. We jumped into the week by learning, tracing, and writing our lowercase and uppercase E's and F's (an easy way to do this is to either introduce both letters together or to break up the week in half and introduce a letter during each half, either way works fine). To go along with our letter fun you can add in a letter of the week craft like we have done here for the letter E and here for the letter F.

This week we kicked off with a fun coffee filter monster game. As you might have seen in past posts we love coffee filter crafts because the materials needed are always on hand and the results are always changing. For our little coffee filter monsters all you need are: coffee filters, markers, and a spray bottle filled with water. Give your preschoolers free range to color the coffee filters as much as they want and when they are done, put them on a plate and begin to spray with your water bottle. The colors will mix together as you spray, since the filters are very thin it doesn't take long for them to dry. I like to cut out little monster shapes after everything is dry, you can either leave them as a finished craft or use them in a counting game like we have. We used our dyed monsters (like you can see below) and let our preschooler role a dice, each time he rolled he would add/subtract that amount of googly eyes to his own monster. This is a really simple game to help develop counting skills and number recognition.

To stay in our fun October theme we made our weekly trip to our local library to pick up some new materials. I honestly cannot emphasize this enough: take advantage of everything your community offers! Our library has an amazing story time for different age groups, they have little themed learning packets (like you can see below) that have different books, movies, music, and some kind of hands on learning material, they even have larger tubs filled with themed learning materials that are a homeschoolers dream!

We decided to continue reusing some of our materials from the previous week for these upcoming weeks to really help our toddlers with number recognition and counting in general. As well as bring in some of our leftover apples from the previous week to make our very own apple prints (you can see them below). For these prints we went ahead and used our homemade finger paints here. For the prints you will only need to slice an apple in half, you can carve little faces in them if you like to keep it in theme with everything October.

 Here is our little pumpkin prints from our carved apples, this one turned out great!

 

Since Halloween is just around the corner we decided to go on a pumpkin patch trip as a fun break from our everyday learning. You can read all about our fun field trip and some of the learning we worked into our special day here. We hope you all enjoyed your week and look forward to jumping into our next month of learning with you!

Happy Halloween from our family to yours!