Letter Of The Week - A

Several months ago, a good friend of mine blogged about the letter book she had made with her daughter. Each week they had made their featured letter and posted it up on their fridge, then for the rest of the week they'd be on the look out for that letter anywhere they could find it; stories, signs, wherever. Then the page moved into a binder, and they started the next letter.

Well, I thought the idea of doing a Letter of the Week project sounded like such fun, but I dragged my feet. My preschooler already knows his letters and their sounds, so would it really be worth the effort to incorporate another project into both our lives? I went back and forth.

But in the end, the fun side of me won out and we started doing it last week. I decided what I would do for this would be to carry on with this from Monday - Thursday and do something with the letter on each of those days. I am not doing Fridays, since that is our Fairytale Time, and the day we go to the library for stories, and I didn't want to get overloaded and make this feel like a chore or just something else on my to-do list. It is supposed to be fun! And then the weekends are always full with other things and I know we wouldn't get to whatever I had planned anyway.

Day One: Mondays are pretty busy around here with laundry, ballet lessons, and family home evening, so our first day of each letter is super simple.

Each Monday I start, as my friend did, by making a page for our Letter Book with my boy.

I cut out a capital A, and he glued it onto some construction paper.

Then we went through my scrapbooking stickers for somethings that began with A to decorate our paper with. We found stickers of apples, alligators, and airplanes.

Also on this day we will read an alphabet book. I am hoping to be able to find enough different ones between the library and my own stash of kids books to have a different book for each week.

Since we put apple stickers on this A, our book this week was Apple Pie by Gennady Spirin.

Day Two: I let the stickers we found guide our week, so on our Tuesday we had an apple day extravaganza.

*We made this cute apple-noisemaker craft.

*Then we made these muffins.

*We sang Farmer Brown has 5 Green Apples.

*We read, 10 Apples Up On Top

Day Three: This was our alligator day. It also happened to fall on our Joy School lesson about Reptiles, so that worked out very nicely!

*We got out our toy animals and played 'aligator family' in the livingroom

*We watched an educational movie from the library all about alligators. (Very interesting!)

*We watched this Youtube video and sang along.

*We read this book of silly poems, entitled, "Alligator Pie" by Dennis Lee. Just a note here - my son is trying to 'smile like an alligator' in this picture. What a goofy kid!

Day Four: Our airplane day!

* First we watched this video and followed along with our own peice of paper to create a paper airplane. It was a little harder than I had hoped for, but with enough pausing and replaying of the video, I figured it out.

Then we flew it! It actually worked really well. Hooray!

*We did an airplane colouring page together.

*I gave airplane rides to the kids in the playroom.

* We read Angela's Airplane by Robert Munsch.

So that was how we began our Letter of the Week fun. This week we're doing the letter B, and I'll "B" sure to pass on the fun we had!