Week 8 Overview - Pumpkins and Halloween!!

We've officially entered my favorite time of year. I just love fall and the weather and holidays it brings! This week we did a pumpkin theme to go along with Halloween. I've planned for every holiday week to be a review of all the numbers and letters we have learned so far. That way we can take a bit of a break from the "learning" to enjoy the holidays.

To review the letters A - D, I took out all of the little books that I got from a preschool alphabet workbook and we read those and our BOB Alphabet books.

I used a printout from the 2 Teaching Mommies pumpkin packet and some letter stickers from my scrapbooking stash to create to create some upper and lower case letter matching cards.

Caleb did such a good job of identifying the letters I asked him to find and making the matches of the upper and lower case letters.

While we were working on our letters I got out the sandpaper letters and flashcards to work more on learning his name. I laid out the letters of his name and had him put the corresponding matching letters underneath. He can now identify his name when it is written out on paper, so he is making great progress!

I found another great pumpkin printable on 2 Teaching Mommies to help review the numbers 0 - 3. I cut out the "pumpkin seeds" and put one of our number cookie cutters on the paper and asked Caleb what the number was and then asked him to count out the correct number of seeds to put inside the pumpkin.

We had some fun pumpkin and Halloween themed books to read to go along with our theme.

And of course, we had to read Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater. :)

I obviously chose orange to be the color of the week and incorporated it into all of our pumpkin themed lessons. For a little fine motor play I let Caleb play with a spoon and orange puffball "pumpkins". He just loved scooping them out and separating them by size.

We continued our annual tradition of going to the pumpkin patch with my dad. I loved watching all of the kids playing in the pumpkins. Although Caleb was really more interested in running around and playing. :)

And here's my little pirate, all ready for trick or treating!

Hope everyone had a happy Halloween!!

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!!