Today's Post Brought to You by the Letter A!

Little Bit is almost 37 mo old

I mentioned in our curriculum plans post, that Little Bit had asked to start "school" of her own, so we are starting some "Letter of the Week" activities.  This past week was our "A" week, so here's what we did for Letter A:

• I made an "A" sensory bin. I went around the house and found small toys that start with A, and rounded it out with a couple new things from the Dollar Store. I put them all in a bin and filled it with rice (couldn't come up with an "A" filler, so just went with rice). This was a HUGE hit, she spent time every day (that we did school), digging the toys back out of the rice and just running her hands through it and such, LOVE it (though the vacuum's going to get to eat lots of rice next time I vacuum, despite my attempts to keep the bin on a placemat so the rice would stay contained.
• We sang the "A" song from Songs for Saplings. Each song is a Bible verse that corresponds to a letter of the alphabet (with some other songs at the end of the CD to correspond to holiday,s etc), so this also led to her learning a memory verse over the course of the week
• I purchased this Letter of the Week curriculum, which includes printables to make an "Alphabet book" so she colored the cover for that  the first day in preparation for adding more things throughout the week.
• I purchased this Letter of the Week curriculum, which includes printables to make an "Alphabet book" so she colored the cover for that  the first day in preparation for adding more things throughout the week.
• I printed, and laminated the letter A from 1+1+1=1's Animal ABCs. We put it on our white board for the week.
• The above Animal ABCs also has a plain letter A, and then alligators to cut out and glue onto the A. Little Bit didn't feel like cutting the day we did that, so Sassy cut them out for her and she glued them on. This was one of the pages we added to her "ABC book".
• We had apples, apricots, and almonds for snacks on various days, and asparagus for lunch one day, yum!
• I printed and laminated these "road" letter A's for her to drive a matchbox-type car on.
• I printed the Alligator "magnet page" from this site. One day we laid the page on a cookies sheet and used some round magnets (I'm not finding ones like ours, but these would work well)   in the dots. One the last day I gave her some dot stickers and she put stickers on the dots, then we added the page to her book.
• I printed an "A" cut and paste page and let her cut out the pictures and glue them around the A.
• I printed and laminated the letter A pattern block page from this site. That page also has the pattern blocks you can print out. We already have pattern blocks similar to these, so we used them. Since Little Bit enjoyed using magnets for other things, I may pull out our Melissa and Doug magnetic pattern blocks for next week and let her use them instead.
• We played with the letter A beanbags from the sets of alphabet bean bags the grandmothers made for Little Bit for her birthday.
• I poured a layer of salt into a plastic shoebox and we practiced drawing A in the salt.
• I also printed a couple different A coloring pages for her to color, and we added them to her ABC book. She put some A stickers on one of them too, because stickers are fun!
• We read lots of A themed books, and alphabet books this week. I went through our bookshelves and pulled out any that seemed in her age range. I also got some from the library.
• On Friday, I was gone, so I left some A activities for Sassy to do with Little Bit while MiniMe and I were gone. To make it more special I dumped all the rice out of the A sensory bin and replaced it with animal crackers, needless to say, THAT was a hit! (and interestingly enough, when she was eating the leftover animal crackers in church this morning, it occurred to her that they weren't in the "blue bin" any longer and asked me about it. I told her there was new stuff in her blue bin (when I fished all the animal crackers out I went ahead and switched it to the "B" stuff for tomorrow morning), she was very excited, and wanted to see her bin as soon as we got home from church. I told her it had to wait till tomorrow. So, the bin continues to be a HIT with or without animal crackers LOL.
• The one thing I wanted to do and didn't get a chance to do was start a "chicka chicka boom boom tree". I would have done that Friday, but didn't want to try to explain it to Sassy, so will do it first thing tomorrow before we start with the "B" stuff. . . that an I'm still thinking on how I want to do it . . . I got an inflatable palm tree at the dollar store (they have "luau" stuff right now) so I'm going to blow that up and we're going to put a letter sticker on the tree at the end of each week.

So that was our letter week. It seems like a lot, but was only 2-3 things per day, and most were short.

You can see most of these ideas, and others, including various coloring pages, on my "Alphabet" Pinterest board. And I'll continue to add to it as we go.

Visit 1+1+1=1 to see more Tot School posts.