Alphabet Days

This probably should go without saying, but I'm saying it anyway: I am overjoyed to have the summer months at home with my littles.  Being a WAHM 9 months of the year truly helps me cherish the 3 months that I can be a SAHM every year that much more... and the added bonus that it's the nicest weather of the year is the icing on the cake.

Being a teacher is in my blood though, and I decided that I wanted to incorporate some structured learning into our summer days together.  Sam and Anna were getting some at daycare because our provider uses a preschool/toddler curriculum and I didn't want to completely eliminate that from their days.  So this summer we're doing a little alphabet adventure- we'll do fun things for letters of the alphabet in addition to regular summer fun stuff each week.  I'm planning on focusing on 2 letters a week to try to get through almost all before school starts up again for me in the fall.  So yeah- that pretty much means only a couple of days per letter.  You won't find me going all out on our activities in that amount of time! 

Now I know that focusing on one letter at a time has received some criticism for not being the most effective way to teach letters and their sounds (because you are not talking about the other ones at the same time if you are exclusively focusing on one), but I'm not worried about it.  I'm going more for exposure and a way to categorize our summer fun.  Maybe next summer I'll go more thematically based in our activities.  For this summer, it seemed like a good way to go for us.

I am going to attempt to post what we did on here so that I can refer to it in following summers to try and avoid repeating much as Sam and Anna get older.  My number one goal is to make it fun for all three of us, and that means minimal prep, but also that if something more fun comes up, or if we don't feel like it, I'll skip it.

So this week we started with  an alphabet introduction/review.  Sam and Anna know many of the letter names and a lot of their associated sounds, but do they know all of them?  Eh- I've never formally assessed all 52 letters and 26 sounds for each of them, so who knows?  They seem to know most consistently, and at not even 2 1/2 years old, that's enough to make me proud.  We read some of our alphabet books- named and handled magnetic letters, sang alphabet songs, and watched some alphabet songs on youtube (Elmo's alphabet song with India Arie is one of their faves).

For awhile now I've posted a letter and the daily weather on our refrigerator to refer to each day.  During our summer I'll change the letters to reflect what we're currently talking about.

We started with letter Aa.  We read books about the alphabet, animals and sang animal songs.  We made alligator handprints. When we first did painted handprints, Sam was very resistant. He is a little more tentative to new sensory sensations.  I was happy to find that this time he was fine with green painted hands and giggled a lot when the paintbrush tickled.

We did dot marker A and a, since Sam and Anna love using our dot markers so much.

Anna is very precise in her dots- she always gets down close to the paper and slowly pushes down.  Sam's more haphazard and doesn't care much if he gets near the dots or not.
We stopped at the pet store while running errands to look at the animals.  This is one of our favorite free things to do.  Sam is started to warm up to the tarantula, but the birds, rodents and kittens always get top billing. 

I finally set up our art easel that has been sitting in our basement since it was unwrapped as a Christmas gift.  We used our dry erase crayons on the whiteboard side. 

We ate apples!  My little ones love apples and they will munch right down to the core.  Unfortunately, it can take them an hour to finish one apple each!

Next was letter Bb.  We read books about bears, bubbles and butterflies. We made butterfly handprints (They chose the colors for our butterflies).

We made butterflies for our windows out of contact paper and tissue paper.  Super easy!

 

We did dot marker B and b. 

We blew bubbles.

We made bird feeders to hang in our yard.  We did this while eating cheerios for a snack.  Anna was a lot more into the fine motor stringing, although Sam could do it.  He just ate each cheerio off the pipe cleaner after he put one on!  I helped him a little bit so he could have a heart too.

We played with balls outside (go figure that the week I write about Sam usually choosing pink, he illustrated the opposite).

And played with squishy balloons filled with flour.

We ate lots of blueberries and we baked bread with berries!