Preschool at Home! Letter of the week B, S, T, and F

Over late Fall and Winter we started a fun preschool program at home with our 4 yr. old little lady.  I decided to do a Letter of the Week program, because it allowed me to follow her interests, work at her own pace, and incorporate a lot of subject areas very easily.  In these months we spent about 2 weeks or so per letter and focused on the letters B, T, M, S, D, and F.  We chose 9-12 items/people/animals that started with those letters and made a flashcard which she helped color/draw and we did activities relating to those letters and items.

With every letter we worked on learning how to write them through various preschool age friendly means including tracing on/in: Montessori sandpaper letters, a tray of salt, dirt outside, a small amount of paint in a secured plastic freezer bag, writing with sidewalk chalk outside, whiteboard markers on whiteboards, a wonderfully fun app on the iphone called Letter School, old fashioned handwriting worksheets, and doing the handwriting lessons in accordance with a Handwriting Without Tears program including the Wet/Dry/Try chalkboard and wooden pieces.

Proud of her m in the salt tray

Wet portion of the Wet/Dry/Try method on chalkboard from Handwriting w/o Tears 

Tracing worksheet, we try to keep these to a minimum, but they helpful.

Try portion of the letter D

Bb: words included bear, bugs, bird, butterfly, boy, book, Bizet (composer), blue, bee, believes, balloon

Bear activities:

Read Maybe a Bear Ate It and Berlioz the Bear 

Turning a bucket into a cave with some rocks and brown paper, we played a math and dramatic play game getting the bears safe in the cave when a storm was coming.  

We reviewed our word card, then took the bears on a walk, but "oh no! there's a storm coming, we better hurry to the cave!" "How many bears made it in the cave first?"  (Have child choose how many were the fastest, then put that number on the table.  (I used dollar tree number manipulatives)

"3 bears went in first, then 5 made it in next, how many total?"

Front of word card

back of word card

"Whew! All the bears made it inside the cave just in time to be safe from the storm!"
 (shake maraca to make the sound of the falling rain:

After the storm is over the bears get hungry, some must go get food, how many are going to go? (roll dice)

Our plate of numbers (Dollar Tree)

5 bears went to get food, but now 2 have go to the bathroom, how many have left the cave total?

Playing with the Counting Bears with the books in the McGrath Math series

Bugs:

What is an insect?  We learned about insects and some of their characteristics (3 segments, no more than 6 legs) We played with a collection of rubber critters I bought many years ago in my music teaching days in a public school.  I filled a box with split peas and threw in some grass and leaves from around our place and we sorted the critters by which ones were classified an insect based on what we'd learned.  Those who were insects got to play in the nature box.

Lil' bro enjoyed playing with the insects too!

Ladybug on the Felt Board:  I found felt sheets at Hobby Lobby with a ladybug print and I just sat down and cut each little bug out of the sheet.  She just got to free play with these on the felt board, but loves math so she turned it into a math lesson any way by putting them into pairs and making them get into line and counted them again and again.  We also performed the Ten Little Ladybugs poem.

Doing some ladybug counting on the felt board with lil bro

Organizing and counting ladybugs on the felt board

Birds:

It just so happened there was a local nature class teaching about Bluebirds the week we were doing B, so we attended that, perfect timing!  We also found a color by number with a bird on it that she wanted to complete.  (below)

Practicing number recognition by coloring a bird on a color by number sheet

Bluebird Dancing:  We also danced around the room like birds singing "Bluebird, Bluebird Through My Window" and at the end of the song we came back to each other and gave "high tens" on the words "won't you be my partner dear?"  The lyrics are:  Bluebird, bluebird through my window, (repeat x3)

                                                               Won't you be my partner dear?

                                                             

We love Bob books!

Butterfly:

Read: The Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle then we brought out my Folkmanis brand caterpillar puppet and made it metamorphosis into a butterfly and fly around the place.

Symmetry:  We decorated just half of a butterfly with paint and then folded it over to see the symmetry on the other wing.  Then we got out her butterfly wings and looked at their symmetry and then put them on and did some snack time :)

Floating Balloon Butterflies: We used a black stamp pad and a butterfly stamp and decorated a not yet inflated balloon with various number butterflies.Then we blew them up and saw the butterfly images get larger and enjoyed gently popping them up in the air to make the butterflies float around our place.  As we floated them up we sang "ooh"  in a high pitch and as they fell lower we'd sing "ooh" on lower pitches.

Butterfly Color Sort:  I cut out 4 identical size butterfly shapes out of construction paper each in a different color and then placed varied foam shapes in a bowl on the table in those colors and she sorted the shapes onto their matching butterfly mat.  Then she used the matching colors and made a design and each side needed to be the same (practicing symmetry)

Butterfly Pasta:  We also borrowed an idea from The Mailbox Preschool magazine to make a letter search with various letters (but lots of B's!) and place farfalle pasta (which looks like butterflies) on each letter B when it is found.  If you count out the pasta ahead of time to match how many Bs are in the letter search then they know how many more to find.
                          Another idea with farfalle pasta is to color the pasta with markers and then decorate a butterfly tree out of construction paper.  This was great practice with a ruler and then scissors as she traced a few long lines for us to make the trunk and branches.  We reviewed the parts of a tree as we made it since we had previously studied trees at a local nature class.  

Pattern Block Butterfly:  We have a Melissa and Doug brand pattern blocks set with about 10 double sided designs you can make with the blocks and one of them is a butterfly.  So she made the butterfly and took notice of the symmetry and then I had her make the butterfly again right below the finished block picture to see if she could make it without the Melissa and Doug pre-fab picture telling her what to do.  She did great!

Life Cycle:  I printed out a circular graph/icon of the Butterfly's Life Cycle and cut out each portion and glued to the back of each stage some felt and we put the life cycle in order on the felt board.

Bizet:

Carmen:  We listened to the French opera Carmen while we did art, cleaned up, played, etc and she loved it and would ask for me to put it on.

Bee:

Bee Selector:  I have a Folkmanis brand bee puppet so we used that bee puppet to prepare steady beat with a poem called "B, B, Bumblebee" to select which books to read next, or which game to play next, etc.  You demonstrate the steady beat by tapping the items to choose between.
 The text is: "B, B, Bumblebee, stung a man upon his knee,
                   stung a pig upon his snout, Oh my goodness,
                   You...are...OUT!"

Bee on Magic School Bus- we read the book and then watched the Magic School Bus tv show "Inside the Beehive" to learn about the hard work of bee.

Blue

Blue Bag Handwriting- I filled a freezer size plastic bag with blue paint and once sealed, she practiced writing her upper and lowercase letter b.

Shades of Blue- I got paint sample cards from Ace Hardware in different shades of blue.  The first day she swiped her finger from the dark shades of blue to the light shades of blue and back the other way.  The next day I had cut a few out of the mix and she needed to put the missing shades back in order.  The third day they were all cut out and she had to put them all in order from lightest shade to darkest shade.  This was fairly tricky for her, but part of that was that this was toward the end of lessons and her patience was running thin.  When we did it again the next day, she had it down, baby :) 

          

Ss: words included star, spider, song, sing, son (of God, we learned about Jesus Christ), Silas (her little bro), saxophone, Saint Saens (Camille Saint Saens the composer), swan, Saturday, Santa (it was Dec obviously, lol), snow, six, snake

Star:  We read Eric Carle's Draw Me a Star and counted the points on the star (5) and punched 5 holes in a page and then strung pipe cleaners into each point and made them cross so they made a star, then she added star stickers to the page as well.  she then learned from the easy directions in that book how to draw a star and we are seeing them everywhere now on her artwork:

Spider:  I put a black spider head and body cut out on the table and a handful of black pipe cleaners and we rolled the dice and counted out different numbers of legs to give the spider.  We also of course performed the Finger Play song of "Itsy Bitsy Spider" and also listened to the Carly Simon version of the song.  We also read Iza Trapani's multi verse version called Itsy Bitsy Spider.

Song/Sing: We talked about what a song is (music with words) and we sang a lot of songs.  The first was  "Star light, Star bright" and pinched stars in the air in a high low motion preparing high low sounds.  We also sang "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" at different tempos and caught the stars at the differing tempos.    

Son (of God): we memorized 1 John 4:15: Whosoever shall confess that Jesus is the son of God, God dwelleth in him and he in God.  

saxophone:  while we did art projects or other just free play we'd listen to music featuring the saxophone and pretend to play it while we listened.  

Saint Saens, Camille- this composer wrote an instrumental piece called Carnival of the Animals and over the course of a few days we read the book Carnival of the Animals, and then listened to the music while looking through the pages, danced or moved like the animals and she loved this and months later still asks to listen to Camille St. Saens while she does art.  

Swan- read Ballerina Swan, dance to Swan Lake by Tchaikovsky.  

Santa- made a Santa out of cottonballs

Snow- play outside in the snow and read Snow by Uri Shulevitz and Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats

Seahorse:  we designed an S with a snout like a seahorse and then decorated it's scales.  We watched some Youtube videos about seahorses as well and linked fingers and floated around the place like the seahorses do with each other's tails.   

Tt:

Our words were turkey, train, turtle, trust, teddy, triangle, tiger, two, Tuesday, ten, toys

Literature: We read Turkey Trouble, and performed the Five Fat Turkeys poem with little hand puppets we made that represented our family members.  

Activities:  We did a lot of art with this letter we made a Turtle out of T and a tiger out of a lowercase t.

Lego t:  She traced her sandpaper letter lowercase t and then designed a lowercase t out of Legos on her Lego board, fun!

Montessori lowercase t sandpaper letter

Two and Ten:  We practiced counting things by twos and by tens.

Triangle:  We learned the difference between equilateral triangles and isosceles triangles with our Montessori shape bases and then using triangles I had cut out from construction paper she designed her own triangle person, she loved doing this!

Train:  Read Stop Train Stop and we made a train track on our Lego board and then had our play trains take rides around the board.

Trust: we memorized Proverbs 3:5 "trust in the Lord with all your heart, lean not on your own understanding" 

Bananagram Spelling:  I asked her to choose a few of her /t/ words to try and match up with a letter card, here she is re-writing two:

Ff:

As we wrapped up our Letter of the Week lessons, we ended with F and did the following activities:

Our words included fox, frog, fish, foot, fruit, four, Frozen (she loves this movie, I had to include it in her word list, lol), faith, flag, flower

Literature:  

Frogs:  We learned about frogs and their life cycle with the following books read about Red Treefrogs in her Ranger Rick Jr mags her grandpa got her, Big Friend, Little Friend, I'm a Frog, Frog in a Bog, Starting Life Frog, Frog and Toad are Friends, and rapped and sang through the books Finklehopper Frog, and Froggy Went a Courtin,

Fox; Hello, Red Fox, Nat'l Geographic Kids magazine about red foxes

Foot: The Foot Book by Dr Seuss

Activities: 

Fish:  We did some fishing for feet, and I just purchased a pack of foam feet from Dollar Tree and slipped a paperclip through the center of the foot and made a makeshift pole out of a our knife sharpener, yarn and those singing magnets.  

Mommy drew a lake on the sidewalk with blue chalk and then we rolled a die with colors on it and if it landed in the 1 square she had to get one of that color and if it landed in the 2 box she needed to get two of them.  I made a color die with squares of color corresponding to the fish.  She had to catch the number of fish in the color that was rolled.

Paper clip slips easily through the center and never ripped out (yay! wasn't sure if this was going to hold up)

I just cut up six little squares, colored them to match the colors of feet we had to catch and taped them on to a die.

Lil' brother enjoyed fishing as well, though he was more interested in seeing how I built the pole.  

 We used Bingo daubers to daub colorful circles all over a blue paper and then she added triangles to the end of the circles to be the fish's tail and happy faces and bubbles.

Phonics:  We are augmenting with a phonics program called Explode the Code, and are working through the primer book A at our own pace.

From the comfort of the couch, she is doing her /f/ pages in Explode the Code book A

Four:  we did various activities with the number 4 including looking for things with four of something, for example while playing with dominoes we sorted separately all the tiles that only had four dots.  We also experimented with what letters, pictures or shapes we could make with 4 sticks.  I glued small strips of felt onto the back of wooden craft sticks and we placed them on our felt board.  

Frog:   We played Frog Hopscotch: I bought Frog cutouts from Dollar Tree and we put them in hopscotch squares and got some exercise hopping around like the frogs.  We cuddled and watched Princess and the Frog (fast forwarding through the villain parts) and the claymation version of the book Frog and Toad are Friends.

Flag:  Read The American Flag and A Flag for All.  We bought a small flag for our place and I taught her about flag etiquette, how to put her hand over her heart while I recited the pledge of allegiance, and then after looking at different family flags, we made one for our immediate family.  She drew pictures of something that related to each of us, for Dad she colored a fish cutout, she drew a music note for Mom, a lollipop for herself, and a book for brother and decorated the flag with various colored stripes.

And the icing on the Letter of the Week F...

Receiving Frozen in the mail...you can guess what we cuddled up and watched that afternoon :)

Coming soon...My Father's World Kindergarten!