Letter of the Week Series- H

This week we worked on Letter H. We used

foam happy face stickers and did H is for Happy!

Letter of the Week Series- G

Grapes were the thing for Letter G. Sandy had this idea for us over on her blog. I love several of her ideas she has for their alphabet book.

We used purple paint and the kids used their finger prints to make the grapes. I drew the vines on for them after they were dry. To help the ones who were younger, I drew dots on the paper and they put their purple finger prints on top of the dots (or somewhere in that range!)

Letter of the Week Series- F

We took last week off to do some Easter activities. This week we talked about letter F. We did a do -a- dot fish and Feathers on a letter F for our alphabet books.

Letter of the Week Series- E

This week we were working on Letter E. We recently purchased a set of long-awaited do-a-dot markers and used them for one of our E projects. I have wanted these for quite a while now and was so excited to finally get them. I had as much fun with them as B did.

We used them to dot over the letter E that I made in black crayon for the kids. The were able to choose what colors they wanted, but of course my son loves BLUE!

We also made a Big E little e hunting game. I also added in the letters A, B, C, and D that we have worked on the past few weeks. I let the kids make up their own control group colors. B selected blue and red as you can see. This idea was from an example of work they have on the shelves in his Montessori classroom.

For our alphabet books this week, I traced 4 egg shapes onto white card stock. Each child used watercolor paints to decorate the eggs.

I just some grass out of green construction paper and they folded the pieces down to make it pop out and look "fringe-y"

We glued our Easter Eggs under the grass so it looked like they were hiding.

Letter C

My blogger friend Sandy at Just for Fun inspired these letter C circles. We used a plastic cup that the kids could hold onto easily and they dipped into 5 different colors of paint to make their circles.

I had originally wanted to do corn kernals on the letter C but that fell through when I discovered that my construction paper would not fit into my page protectors in the binders. I wanted each letter to be in the covers so items like the corn kernals would not fall off with the children looking at their alphabet book repeatedly. But I like the circles too, so everything worked out.

Stop over at Sandy's blog and check out all of the other amazing ideas she has for things to do with your kids. She is constantly giving me ideas and inspiration!

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.