It all began with Letter A

When we started homeschooling back in September, we began with the letter A.  This was back before I decided to start our blog, and was just recording our activities into a Lesson Plan Book.  Though I really prefer the blog, I'm glad I had the Lesson Plan book, so I can go back and blog what we did that week.

We sang, "The Ants Go Marching" every morning as we began our day.  Little Guy abosolutely loves that song! 

Little Guy was taking Preschool Spanish at Spark! Enrichment Center every Monday at that time.  We originally signed him up for it for 2 reasons: to learn spanish, and interact with other children.  Well, as it turned out, there was only one other child in the class with him!  A little girl.  Still, we kept him in it, hoping more kids would join.  We were still really much more looking for the social aspect rather than the spanish aspect. I mean, he was learning numbers, colors, family members, which is all great; but I can teach him all that.  I wanted him to be around other kids in a classroom setting.  After about a month and a half, the little girl stopped showing up, so it was just Little Guy and his private spanish tutor (which is kind of awesome, except that wasn't what we were looking for).  We eventually stopped going too.  Plus we had fall ball starting up, and we discovered Story Time at the Library (which we love!)

Ok, back on track.  We did some apple printing, and learned a little about Johnny Appleseed.  We talked about him, did a coloring page, and watched a Johnny Appleseed movie.

We did some animal cracker addition, where I basically wrote 1 + 1 = ___, and 1 + 2 = ___, and so on on a piece of paper, gave little guy a handfull of animal crackers, and helped him arrange the crackers right on top of the equations to come up with the answers.  Needless to say, his favorite part was eating the crackers when we were done!

We learned all about ants during this week.  How they are insects and that they have 6 legs and 3 body parts and the names for them.

For snack, we made ant hills.  Little Guy smashed up graham crackers in a ziplock bag, which we then poured into a bowl, added some chocolate chips, and voila!  Edible Ant hill!

On Friday, we made an alligator puppet out of a paper bag, and we baked an apple crisp! Then we put up our Alphabet tree.  Each week we add the letter of the week to it.

The books we read during letter A week:

"10 Apples Up On Top"
(silly, Seuss-like counting book)

"Abiyoyo" by Pete Seeger
(South African folk story.  Kinda cute)

"Max's Apples" by Rosemary Wells
(Around here, we just love Max and Ruby!  Counting book)

"Chicka Chicka Boom Boom" by Bill Martin Jr. 
(awesome book)

"I Am an Apple" by Jean Marzollo
(great nonfiction about the cycle of an apple)