Week 7 Overview - "D is for Ducks"

This week we focused on learning the letter D, the color yellow, and the number 3. I chose a duck theme to go along with our lessons.

We had some really great books to go along with our theme.

In case you're wondering I get most of my books of the week from my mom's "library". She is a retired elementary school teacher and a lover of children's books and has a very impressive collection! Over 900 books on her bookshelves! So when we went out to visit her on our vacation, I brought along my lesson plans and picked out enough to last us the first 17 weeks of school.

One of Caleb's favorite books was Five Little Ducks. He loved singing the song with me and we even got out some of our duck bath toys to help illustrate the song.

His favorite part was when the mother duck said, "Quack, quack, quack!". The biggest toy duck (who we made the mommy) actually made quacking sounds when squeezed, so he would squeeze it whenever we got to that part of the song.

Our duck craft I got from ABC Jesus Loves Me, I used the template provided to cut out shapes from construction paper and then traced Caleb's hand to make the duck's feathers.

I had Caleb help me glue the pieces together and then had him choose some googly eyes to stick on. Here's our finished duck!



I also used our duck cookie cutter on Caleb's breakfast toast. :)

For the letter poster, Caleb stuck dots on the letter D.

He also played with the letter D foam letter stickers.

We played with our color of the week in Play-Doh and used the number 3 cookie cutter to help reinforce the number of the week. I really had planned on making more of our homemade playdough, but got lazy and used some that we already had in the house. He didn't seem to mind. :)

We also made another page that will go in our apple tree counting book.

Another fun week!





Week 6 Overview - "C is for Cats"

I think I'm going to stop posting the lesson plans, as I realize those may not be quite as interesting as seeing what we actually do. I'll just cover everything we do in a weekly overview.

The letter of the week was the letter C and I chose to make it a "C is for Cats" theme. To introduce the letter of the week, Caleb glued cotton balls onto the letter C.

We worked more on his name this week, which was perfect since our letter of the week was the first letter of his name! C is for Caleb! This week I spelled out his name with flashcards again, but this time pulled out the same letters in our sandpaper letters and had him find the matches to each letter and put it underneath.

I was so proud when yesterday we were playing with the Magnadoodle and I wrote out his name and he looked at it and said, "That's my name!". Success!!

I also brought out the foam letter stickers for the week and he played with those for a while.



To go along with our cat theme, we read the story of Daniel in the lions' den from My Story Bible.

We also read from our books of the week.

For a craft to go along with our theme, we made a lion from a paper plate! I originally got the idea from something I saw on Pinterest, but changed it a bit when I found that the rotini pasta we were going to use for the lion's mane doesn't glue very well to paper plates.

For supplies, we used a paper plate, watercolor paints, construction paper, and glue. First we painted the plate with orange, yellow, and red watercolor paint.

Then I cut out eyes from white and black paper, a nose from brown paper, and a mouth out of black paper. I also cut out skinny strips from yellow, orange, and brown paper to make the lion's mane. This project ended up being a lot more "mommy work" since it took me a while to curl up all of the strips of paper for the mane. While I did that, I let Caleb paint another paper plate however he chose. I did get his help gluing the curled paper to the plate.

After we made the lion we did the Going on a Lion Hunt chant. Caleb had a lot of fun acting that out. I wish I had remembered to take a picture, but I was busy acting it out, too! :)

Our color of the week was purple. To incorporate the color into some fine motor skills, we did some finger painting with purple paint! Caleb looked at me a bit incredulously when I told him he could actually put his hands in the paint!

While he painted, I read him Harold and the Purple Crayon.

I made some more playdough, but couldn't seem to find the grape Koolaid packet I had to make it scented. We used it to cut out our number of the week and to make the letter C.

For the number of the week, we are creating an apple tree counting book. Each week we add the correct number of apple stickers to a tree. At the end of the school year we should have a complete book with pages for 0 - 20.

Another great week! I am so happy he is still enjoying school time so much!!

Week 5 Overview

I dropped the ball quite a bit last week with doing school and updating the blog. I was fighting off some sort of bug and had zero energy. I didn't get to do all I had planned for our week, but I still managed to cover the basics.

This week we learned the letter "B". Caleb already knew this letter, so it was mostly review for him. For our letter activity, we glued beans inside the letter B.

I also brought out my foam letter stickers for the letter of the week and he played with those for a while. I was proud of him when he started separating them by color and then finding the matching upper and lower case letters in each color.

Our theme for the week was "B is for Bears". We read all of the books I had chosen, with our favorites being the Corduroy books. Caleb also had a lot of fun acting out the poem, Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear. I really wanted to do some sort of bear related craft, but had no energy that day. Instead, we found teddy bears from Caleb's room and the twins' nursery and put them in the storage cubes in our school area. Hannah had a lot of fun pulling them all out their cubes and throwing them on the floor. :)

To learn the color blue, I made more scented playdough. This time I added berry flavored Kool Aid to the recipe and added a little extra blue food coloring. It didn't have a super strong scent, but had a slight fruity smell.

We used our number cookie cutters to cut out the number of the week.

For a little fine motor play and to incorporate the color of the week, I brought out a colander and some blue pipe cleaners and let Caleb thread the pipe cleaners in and out of the holes. He had a blast with this!

This was the first week that I introduced learning his name. We will be continuing this throughout the year, with the hope that the end result will be that he can write out his first name. To teach him the spelling of his name, I spelled it out using flashcards and we sang C-A-L-E-B to the tune of  "B-I-N-G-O". He thought it was so cool to have a song all about him! :)

It was a fun week, even though we didn't do everything planned. Luckily I'm feeling much better now and this current week is going much better!

Here is our wall at the end of the week.

Week 5 Lesson Plans

Theme: Bears

Bible Story: Baby Moses

Bible Song: Jesus Loves the Little Ones Like Me

Nursery Rhyme: Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear

Color: Blue

Letter: B

Number: 1

Books of the Week:

 Fine Motor Skill: Cutting with safety scissors

Gross Motor Skill: Act out "Going on a Bear Hunt"