Letter of the Day Training Camp: A!!

 It's SUMMER TIME!

Summer seems to be the only time this little blog gets any lovin'. Sad, but true. I'm not sure how people do it, but I can barely manage one blog at a time. During the school year, I post more on my teaching blog. But summer time, is more on the family blog so...

Here we go again!

My little guy just turned 4 and we are going to take a crack at this whole Letter of the Day thing. Really different with boys, I can already tell. But my plan is to just make it fun, light and possibly just long enough to hold his attention! Bless his heart, his attention span is that of a fly so with knowing that, I am not going to go overboard and do a lot of prep work.  I have a feeling that this Letter of the Day Training Camp will look a little different than it did with Myla. You can see all the fun we had HERE!

My fellow coworkers, AKA the best 2nd grade teachers around, gave me the suggestion to tailor our activities to what he's interested in....SPORTS! Hence the title, "Letter of the Day Training Camp". So, we will be doing a whole lot of activities involving Athletics. Get it? No, but in all honesty,  I plan to stick to what interests him. So ALL BOY stuff. We will be having some cars, trucks, and trains in there too! I do want him to be well-rounded, right?!

I do know that he can already identify the letter A so we are certainly off to a great start!

"Noah...point to the "A".   Good Boy.

Genius, I know.

Then at that time, Myla started singing her Alphabet Sound song she learned from school..."A is for apple...aah, aah, apple." So then he wanted an apple...

My goal for the letters he already knows is that he will be able to match to the lowercase "teammate."

I have the capital and lowercase magnets already on our fridge. So before we attempt to match, I have a Letter App on our iPad to introduce. He loves getting technology time so this is a great place to start. Hopefully I can get him off. :-/

Such concentration here....

The app is called ABC Phonics and this is the Letter Tracer selection. It's a FREE app and it does the job.

Then I had him find the match on the fridge. To keep with the sports theme, I explained that every letter has a partner or a teammate. He liked that analogy. :)

This was a little hard for him to find since this isn't the "a" he is used to seeing. 

One of the things I loved about doing these letter activities with my daughter a couple years ago, was having all the letter crafts hung upstairs for them to see. 

She was so proud when we finished!

This time around, I do not have very high expectations that Noah will put for the effort to make a craft. I know I would end up making the entire thing. He desperately needs the fine motor practice with cutting etc so I might include that in activities that we do instead. I do like the idea of having the letters up so I plan to take pictures of him either dressed up (he actually loves getting dressed up!) or doing the letter activities. 

Today is "A is for Athlete!" So here he is dressed up as an athlete! ha ha!

Now, on to Miss Myla...I didn't want to completely leave her out of all the fun so we will also be doing some activities each day. My main goals for her are improved writing (including handwriting!), lots and lots of reading, and strengthen her math skills. I came up with a few things I want her doing daily...

Handwriting practice!!

I had copied some letter handwriting sheets months ago and thought today was the perfect day to start! We will do a page a day A-Z. We decorated a cute cover, traced the letters a few times and wrote as neatly as we could. I then had her circle her best letter in each row. (Gosh, I know, the teacher in me does NOT take a break because it is summer time or because it's my own kid. I. just. can't. help. it!)

Done with our page and we are decorating our cover a little more. :) 

Once we were done, my eager one was asking "what's next?"

It was then that I made the connection that every Monday could be MATH MONDAY! I had remembered that her kinder teacher had sent home a CD-ROM of their math curriculum. Score! I love free resources!! So I popped that disc in and went straight to the money unit. One of the things she needed to work on was identifying and counting coins...

I got out some real coins for us to work with. She was able to identify each one by name. :)

Then we went through a few of the pages...it's not interactive so Myla asked for some paper to work some of the problems....

Here she was shown 3 coins and had to draw how many she would need to get 10 cents. 

Way to go, My!

Part of our nightly routine is I read a book and then she reads a book. I am so proud of her reading this year! She entered kinder not reading at all and now she is reading everything...attempting to read street signs, billboards, words on my computer screen as she is looking over my shoulder...anything, really. I can't wait to see how much her reading improves since we plan to be reading LOTS this summer!

Day 1 is complete!

I have a few ideas for "B" day tomorrow. Blueberries for Breakfast? Balloons and bubbles at bath time? Baseballs, Basketballs, and Bears....oh my! Who knows? It's bound to get crazy!

Tomorrow Noah does go to Basketball camp with daddy for most of the day so we will have to squeeze in some "B" activities later in the afternoon!

 We will see what plays out!