This was our second week of the Letter of the Week curriculum.  It is still going really well.  Although I will admit that some of the themes are a little strange.  Like in two weeks the theme is eyes…I think we might be switching that one up a little!  Here is our learning poster for the week:

Letter – Bb, Number – 2, Color – green, Theme – jungle, Vocabulary Word – vine, and Nursery Rhyme – Little Bo Peep

We practiced dressing her baby doll for a practical life activity.  She still gets very discouraged if she can’t do something right the first time, but we are working on gaining confidence and independence!

I started implementing a sticker chart last week to help with her independently completing activities.  She is always wanting me to do some part of the activity for her.  For each activity she completes on her own (for the most part), she earns a sticker.  When she completes a row of five activities she gets a piece of candy.  If she fills up her chart she gets a sucker.  So far it is working out well.  Although, if she doesn’t earn a sticker then she tends to give up for the day!

Shape race.  I laid out green shapes on her desk and then would call out a shape for her to race and get and place on the blanket.  She would choose which action she wanted to get from place to place (i.e. run, hop, skip).  She did so good with this!

We practiced writing the letter B all over a balloon. 

Bird and nest letter match – she matched capital letter to capital letter.

I gave her a sheet with different pictures on it, some starting with B and others not.  She had ot choose the B objects and color them.  Then we cut them out and glued onto her butterfly.  I was really impressed with how she was able to determine the correct sound the words began with.

On this worksheet with her nursery rhyme she colored to B’s with a purple marker and the A’s with a yellow one.  This required a little assistance and we had to go line by line, but she did great!

She glued white pom poms onto a cut out of a sheep.  Then we talked about what you would see around the sheep.  She said she would see green grass, a red sky and a yellow sun.

She practiced stringing letter beads onto a piece of string. As she would string the letters she would say their names and sometimes their sounds.  (Helpful tip – place a piece of string on the end they will be stringing the beads or objects onto to decrease string from fraying.  Also tape down to the surface you are working on to keep it steady for little fingers!).  Please take note of the collection of "objects" watching her during learning time!

Sheep number match.  The sheeps bodies had certain number of dots and she had to match up the heads with the correct number.  We did the same game with some capital and lowercase letters later in the week too.

Letter B bear!

We also played with her blocks and babies a lot this week.  I didn’t do much with the theme this week because I ran out of time to research it!  We did make a rainstick though out of a paper towel tube, toothpicks and rice.  She has enjoyed making music with it this week.

She also enjoyed playing teacher this week and walking through our calendar time, which includes going over our learning poster!

Here were her journal words for this week:

1. Name – we continue to practice this and get her writing it at an appropriate size.  She writes so large right now it covers the whole page and is all over the place!
2. Green – she found pictures of green things in a magazine and I cut them out for her to glue in her journal.
3. Baby – I modeled for her how she could draw a picture of a baby on her own.
4. Vine – she practiced drawing squiggly lines for vines.

Next week we will move onto the Letter C, as well as trying to do a few fun Halloween activities!

Last week I mentioned that we would be starting our Letter of the Week Curriculum (LOW).  I found this curriculum here, and am using it as a springboard for our activities each week.  This curriculum centers around a learning poster comprised of a letter, number, shape/color, vocabulary word and nursery rhyme.  It isn’t a very detailed program, but I think it is great one to use as a guide and then expand on it as you see fit.  If you are looking for a cheap preschool curriculum (this one is free) then I would recommend checking it out.  We are only one week in, and I am finding it very helpful.  It also offers different levels if your child is older or younger than three. 

As mentioned above, each week has a letter, number, shape/color, vocabulary word and nursery rhyme.  I will be sharing each of those items from the learning poster each week and then expanding on them as I see fit.  Here is our learning poster from this week.

And here are some of our activities for the week.

This is from when I taught kindergarten.  She matched the apples (uppercase letters) to the worms (lowercase letters).  Afterwards we had to use the worms as characters and play with them for a bit!

She made apple prints with apples halves and paint.

We put the characters from our nursery rhyme (Hey Diddle Diddle) onto popsicle sticks and then reenacted the NR.

I read her the story about the Little Red House and then we cut open an apple to see the star inside.

Then we took the poem version of the story and matched up pictures for each line.  When I taught kindergarten we did this in a pocket chart.

We graphed apples based on which color we spun on our apple spinner.

Number spotted cows.  She used glitter glue to make corresponding spots for each numbered cow.

We talked about real and fantasy and what fantasy in our NR and then glued pictures onto the correct side.

I was not very good with the camera this week, but here are a few more  notable activities we did.

1. I held up shape cards and she would jump for each square and touch her toes for any other shape.
2. Part of the LOW curriculum is to have a counting book that you add to each week. This week we placed one sticker on the number one page and practiced writing the number.  I will try to snap a picture in future weeks to show what the book looks like.
3. Read some books about Johnny Appleseed.

I also have Mikayla doing a journal "writing" each day.  I write the word and then leave an extra line for her to write the word if she wants to.  She also has space to draw a picture or glue something each day.  Some days she is really excited about writing something and others not so much.  I only really push it on the days she is supposed to write her name (which will happen each week).  Here are her journal "writings" for this week.

1. Name – practice writing her name on designated spaces (this did not go well )!
2. Cow – She glued a picture of a cow in her journal and then  colored it.  She also practiced writing the word.
3. Apple tree – I drew the tree and then she stamped her fingerprints for the apples.  She then counted the apples as I wrote the numbers beside them.
4. Aa – she used her letter stamps to stamp A’s all over the page.