Letter of the Week Series

I am so excited that we are beginning a letter of the week series. I have been inspired by so many blogs that do this, but especially Sandy at Just for Fun, Allie at No Time for Flashcards, and Jennifer at The Ramblings of a Crazy Woman.

Sandy talked about how she is going to keep the letters in a binder. This was the idea that made me realize how easy it would be for us to incorporate the letters into our usual "unit work" that we do. I love the idea of keeping them in a binder (one of our moms donated them) and we are going to keep each sheet in page protectors so the kids can take their books out and look at them. I have several teacher resource books that I have gone through and marked ideas for each letter and we will also try to bring in other art activities or snacks to go along with our letters.

After a few weeks of deciding how exactly I wanted to set this up, I have decided we will do it alphabetically. I was thinking of pulling letters out and doing them that go along with each theme that we work on, but that is where I have gotten out of routine before with letters. It always seemed that we were doing the same letters over and over, but never hitting some others. This way if we just work through alphabetically, we will touch on each one. There is a great post about the debate on what is the best way for letter introduction on the Teachingtinytots Blog.

So... We have been working on Letter A this week. Our first page for our binders was done with apple stamping. We used cut apples (that had dried for a few hours) dipped in paint on our letter A.

We also made Apple Smiles for our snack. We cut our apples into wedges, spread PB on one side on a wedge, added 5 mini marshmellow teeth, and put another wedge with PB on top. The kids thought they were cute and all 5 of them ate their whole snack! I had found this recipe in a book I picked up at a friend's garage sale. It is called "Book Cooks- 26 Recipes from A-Z Inspired by Favorite Children's Books". The book has a recipe card for each snack idea and also has other ideas to go with each letter besides recipes. It will be a great resourse for our letter series.

My plan is that we will work on one letter each week and possibly use the last week of each month to review.