Letter of the week. Letter A, Day 2.

Today has been a pretty laid back day. I didn't even really think about doing anything at all until after church when I realized I didn't have a ride to church tonight and needed a way to bribe my little girl inside out of the beautiful weather once her and Rand had a nice coating of dirt all over.

We came inside and I gave her playdoh, which she played with for a while. Then I started making a few 'a' word figurines. Ants, acorns, arrows, and apples. I rolled out snakes for her and she tried making uppercase and lowercase a's with them, and I wrote all the words out on a page and asked her to point them out. Even though we haven't even tried focusing on bigger words like arrow, she was able to point them ALL out correctly. She gets so excited at how excited *I* get about it. LOL

After that, we had a snack. (ants on a log, of course!) I'm still not convinced she ate much of her celery. She kept wanting peanut butter refills, though! hehe

Right now the babies are watching their current favorite movie, Ratatouille, while supper cooks. Since I've been feeling sick all day, I opted for a fast favorite tonight. Spaghetti! Complete with letter A garlic toast.

The huge box of Wilton cookie cutters I bought from Walmart has never stopped being useful. Too bad I'm pretty sure the babies have lost a few random letters... LOL

Here is the day in pictures:

Tonight we'll do some more reading, maybe some coloring, and just enjoy the evening. It's one of those super laid back days. It is a Sunday, after all! ;)

Letter of the Week! Letter A, day 1.

So after thinking about it for WAY too long, I finally decided to try my own version of the letter of the week curriculum. I don't know how long each 'week' actually will be. I'm actually doing this with both my almost-4 year old and my almost 2-year old, so they get to do some things together, and then while Rand is napping or playing Brea and I focus on some other stuff.

My goal with Brea is to have her counting to 100 soon (right now she's only very comfortable with counting to 10, still.) and focusing

a little more on math. She gets the idea of adding/subtracting, but it hasn't actually clicked well yet. As far as I'm concerned she is progressing incredibly well with reading. She knows all of her letters of course, the sounds they make, and when you give her a list of words (even 5+ letters) and ask

her to point out certain words she does so perfectly almost every time.

With Rand, I'm just focusing on recognizing letters, colors, shapes, stuff like that. He already proudly points to the poster in our kitchen saying "A! A! A!" as it is. ;) I also want to incorporate sign language, and with Brea, spanish. Putting it all out in words makes me nervous I've bitten off more than I can chew, but this is a very laid back atmosphere. If we hit our marks, great! But it's not going to be a problem to take a few more days than anticipated if that's necessary.

So, without further ado, I'll give you our day-to-day activities.

Here is the beginning of our growing poster. Right now we just have the letter of the week (I'm reinforcing the uppercase/lowercase to Brea, and showing these to Rand daily. I think for Rand soon I will post up a shape to start off with for him to color, point at, etc. while Brea and I might focus on a more complicated craft or activity involving them, even though she knows all of her shapes. Can't hurt to reinforce. I'll have Rand color the shape the suitable color of the week later, and we can do some color-related things. I'm anticipating colored foods, scavenger hunts, crafts and the like in the future. ;)

Now because the weather has been SO AMAZING lately (yay for needing jackets!!) we took some of our learning outside!

I picked up a huge pack of sidewalk chalk from the Dollar Tree the other day, and Brea traced my A's and attempted to write her own. She's way more interested in the letter B, but she obliged and was quite proud of her results.. :)

After that we just had a lot of fun looking for 'a' words (this meant spending quite a bit of time playing with the abundance of ants that live here in GA. And once Rand woke up from his nap he came outside, still in pj's, and the two of them just had fun playing in a dirt pile with their favorite outside toy, a dump truck my parents bought them last year.

Later that night, we spent time reading books and pointing out any letter a's we came across. My (and their!) favorite books for this would definitely be Southwestern's My Set books. They are AMAZING.

I think this pretty much summed up Day 1. Oh, and did I mention we didn't start on a Monday? It was actually a Saturday. I spent the day at the Dollar Tree getting some colored posterboard, school supplies, and tons of reward stickers (Brea LOVES stickers!) that she puts all over the poster when she earns them. I just couldn't wait 2 days to start. ;)

I hope you enjoy reading about our crazy little life. :)

Teaching them..? I'm teaching myself!

I've slowly been teaching my 3 year old more and more each day. Now she asks "Let's do school!" throughout the day, and I can tell things are starting to stick.

This has really been exciting for me. Especially since I've decided once we move into our new place (named "Little House" by Brea) to start my own variation of The Letter of the Week Curriculum.

I stumbled across one blog not too long ago (I wish I still had the link!) of a mom who made sure her children did a craft every day. It was awesome! I've always been told I was creative, but I wish I was as creative as some people I know!! Maybe this will help. :D

Each day once we begin this 'curriculum' we'll be doing a daily craft. I already have the first week done. I'm pretty excited! :)

Until then, we've been delving into phonics. We're not really using anything special except for a box of cute phonics card I picked up at the $1 bin at Target, and a dry erase book my daughter LOVES.

Brea has my attention span when I was her age. I remember the story my momma told me all the time; when I was young she was reading to me and my two sisters. Apparently I was climbing all over the place, hanging upside down from furniture and trying to stand on my head. She stopped mid-sentence and asked what she has been reading about, and I recited it all back to her. That is Brea!

When I first started using her flash cards, it was the typical scenario: look at the card, say "a".. what does A say?

Well, that stopped around "G".

Obviously I was going to have to do something a little different if I wanted to keep her attention span.

So we started laying out the cards in order on the floor, reenacting things that started with the letter we were working on. (example... J is for jump, so Brea would hold the card and go leaping about for a moment before laying it down)

We made it through the entire alphabet! I never have seen her attention held that long! It was really exciting to me, and she was so proud of herself!

See?

But you know who has been learning the most during these activities?

Me.

I learn so many things I do that don't work, and am learning what things do. I'm learning patience, flexibility, and a myriad of other things. I have so much to learn from this, and think sometimes that I am bringing away more from teaching Brea than even Brea is learning! It's pretty incredible. :)

So here is my blog. I will be updating it with random posts from our schooling, outings, crafts, and projects.

I hope you enjoy reading! :)

Oh, sorry if my writing is poor right now. I'm trying to write through a massive headache while the babies sing and dance around behind me watching Word World on Netflix. ;)