E!

We left this week for a vacation at Sam and Anna's grandparents' cabin for several days, so we only had a few days to focus on one letter at home- letter E.  It works out better this way for other reasons, too- we'll end up being on letter F for the Fourth of July.  And flags!  And fireworks!  Fun!

Back to E:

We made elephants with our handprints.

We did our dot letter E and e... (Well, Anna did.  Sam didn't want to this week.)

We ate eggs with breakfast.  Okay- Sam ate eggs at breakfast.  We still can't get Anna to grow to like any sort of eggs, so she won't touch them.  Sam ate all of mine plus his.

We did several activities with plastic eggs.  First, we sorted them by color and counted them.  Anna surprised me when she told me there were 5 bowls we were using.  I knew she count count objects consistently to 4, but this was the first time I noted she counted a group of 5 objects.  She also knows that she has 5 fingers on a hand, but that isn't by counting them. 

We made simple AB patterns using the eggs by copying patterns, creating, and extending patterns.

I also put letter pairs in the eggs for us to discover. (Upper and lowercase because I feel strongly that we're not just practicing the uppercase letters.  Here's a tip from the kindergarten teacher in me:  teach your children to write their names with correct letters initially, NOT using all capitals at first.  They would just have to relearn anywaylater, so save yourself and their teachers some time.  Your child's preschool and kindergarten teachers will thank you!)  Sam and Anna had a ball cracking the eggs open to see what was hiding inside.  They were unhappy when I put them away because it was dinner time!

Yes, Anna is wearing a tutu.  She wanted to, and I saw no reason to make her take it off.  At one point she was also wearing her water shoes with her tutu.  Life with toddlers can be very entertaining sometimes!

We watched a little Elmo, and made our own Elmo faces using precut circles.  I used it as a time to talk about shapes and their relative sizes, as well as Elmo's mouth being half a circle.

We wrote Elmo's name at the bottom together after we finished.

After doing things with a few letters now, I've noticed some trends.  Anna likes to sit at the table and do more paper-type things, which Sam has little interest in a lot of that.  Because of that, I'm not really leaning towards more of the paper sheet kind of stuff, but more the hands on projects.  One thing is certain: paint is always a huge hit!