Letter A Week

(29 Months)

This week we played with the letter A.  Our first activity was placing smily face stickers inside the outline of the letter A.  Peeling and placing stickers is an excellent exercise for developing fine motor skills.  To make it easier for the kidabunks to peel the stickers off of the page, I remove the backing sticker first.

I was so impressed that they both stayed inside the lines.  Wild One spaced his stickers sporadically throughout the letter A.  Little Miss was more meticulous about placing her stickers in a line.  After she finished placing her stickers, she decided to color in the letter.  I love how they create their own work!

They love pom poms, especially magnetic pom poms (to make them magnetic, I hot glued magnetic craft dots onto the pom poms while the kids were napping).  We placed these fantastic bubble sheets from Confessions of a Homeschooler onto a cookie sheet and then let the kids go straight to work. Once they finished their letter A worksheet, they asked to work on "another one please Mommy".  I hope they are always this eager to do their work, I know that's naive of me- but, I'm hopeful.  Little Miss then began practicing her counting with the magnetic pom poms (thank you again Ericka for a beautifully artistic and fun activity sheet).

We practiced tracing letters on Letter Quiz.  They love this app!  It allows them to achieve success in tracing letters by providing bumpers alongside the outlines (almost like how bumper bowling allows you always to knock down pins).   It's definitely on their Top Ten List (post to follow shortly).

Grandpa and Little Miss practiced connecting the dots to form capital A's on easel paper.  Little Miss watched as Grandpa used his marker to make little dots in the formation of an A.  She then tried to duplicate the A with dots, and Grandpa had to show her to connect the dots.  I love my Dad!  She's been asking me to draw dots ever since.

We haven't created too many pasting projects.  For some reason we gravitate towards the messier play of markers, paint, stamps and shaving cream to cutting and glue sticks.  Which is a shame, because scissor practice and glue stick practice are excellent for continuing to develop those fine motor skills.  For their letter art project I came up with The Matching Apple Tree.  This activity is so simple and relatively quick to put together.

To my surprise they matched the letters quite effortlessly.  Although, with only three apples left, Wild One got up and started hopping on tile letters instead of finishing his tree.  It took several minutes of coaxing to get him to finally finish his three apples (the winning ticket, once you're all done then you can show it to daddy and hang it on the door).  Meanwhile, Little Miss would pick up a letter as she was scanning the tree to find the corresponding upper or lowercase match.  She completed all of the uppercase letters first and then worked on the lowercase, she's so methodical.

 

AND...We are also going to practice with our letter A printable, our matching upper to lowercase letter shoe box, and our sun bleached letter puzzle.  

That's all folks!