D-day!

So, D is for dinosaurs, decorating, digging, detective-hunting (totally made that word up) and dancing! We started off our morning, at breakfast, finding the "C" stickers to put on our paper towel tube, since we forgot yesterday. I reminded her about the letter for today and we reviewed. Then she was able to find her "D" stickers. :)

Almost immediately after breakfast she was ready to start our next activity. And that would be our dinosaur craft...turned out pretty cute! We just used green construction paper for the D and I also had the light green foam paper. She thought it was fun to color the background.

Once we were done with our dinosaur I went off to tend to Noah who was up to no good. (Trying to get on the computer and most likely about to write on the wall with the marker that he had in his hand! Caught him just in time. ) I took him for a diaper change and came back in the dining room to check on Myla and she had "decorated the D with rainbow colors" (completely her own words). She was so proud of herself that I had to get a pic.

Later we got to our "D" scavenger hunt. We found door, dresser, dolls, deer, dish, dragon and dollhouse! Not all pictured here.

The scavenger hunts have definitely been the challenging part for her. She can easily recognize the letter of the day but does not have the sounds down yet. I have to be careful that she is not getting overwhelmed. I know this is all good exposure and she definitely gets excited when I find something that starts with the letter but she isn't quite ready to see things in her room and name sounds. Another thing I learned today about Myla and the scavenger hunts is that she does not like leaving the labels up the next day. She wants to take them all off so we can start new the next day. I have been leaving just a couple of things labeled like "bed, dresser, door, etc that I think will be great for some early reading. She "read" the word "bathtub" today when she was in the bathroom and was pretty proud of herself. :) D is for digging! The next activity was definitely the most fun so far. I made a sensory tub out of brown rice and stale cheerios. (It was a great way to clean out my pantry!) I just poured the cereal and rice in my cupcake carrier which worked out pretty well. Then I buried some "D"s and "D" things. Here is a pic of what I put in it.

I made sure to include lots of "D"s but wanted to also include the letters in her name and a few other letters that she knows so that she could differentiate. The object was to just dig for Ds! Very fun!

While Noah was busy stuffing his face with stale cheerios, Myla was excited to find a dinosaur card!

Here are all the "D" things she found!

Then Nana brought over a wagon so we tried it again by pouring everything in the wagon so it was deeper. Pretty neat idea, but by this time, Noah was off to something else so Myla wanted to go play with him so this part was short-lived.

Nana also brought over these gigantic letters that she was giving to my sister but thought we could play with them first. We spread them all out and Myla would hop to the letters she knew. We had her lay down on her name when she found it.

We then hid the letters that she knew in the other room for a little hide and seek game. But since it was "D-day" we called it "detective hunting". Didn't get a pic of this though. I also did not get a picture of our dance night but we turned on the Wii for a few songs of Just Dance Kids so we could get our Dancing in. :) I have no idea what we are doing tomorrow for Letter E. I'm thinking...well, right now I am thinking about going to bed. I plan on winging it tomorrow.

C is for Cereal, crabs, cleaning and cookies!

The title sums up our "C" day! The first thing Noah said this morning when he woke up was "cheerios!" It was as if he knew it was the letter of the day. So Noah had his Cereal but Myla wanted waffles. She did ask what letter waffles starts with. :)

Noah's placemat says "The Chairman" which is the nickname my dad gave him awhile back since he would just sit back and observe everyone. So it took Myla a little time to find the "C" since the font was different but she did find it after eliminating a few of the other letters!

After breakfast I didn't waste any time getting to the next "C" activity...Cleaning! Yes, I put them to work. It was also their daily Chore for the day so that worked out nicely.

Our "C" craft was making a crab!

Then I thought we could add some cereal in the sand and that would stand for the soft /c/ sound and the crab represents the hard /c/. You don't really realize how jacked up the English language is until you are teaching phonics to a 4 year old.

Noah was happy just eating the Cheerios.

I left to go run some errands and Jeff took the kids out to lunch to meet one of his former basketball players, C.C. I asked him to take a picture of the kids with C.C. but he refused. Oh well. He'd leave the letter of the day teaching up to me. After dinner, we made our "C" cookie and thought of our family and friends names that started with letter C. She came up with a couple on her own but still needed help so I wrote the names of different people on paper for us to sort. She loved this! She could easily identify the letter C by this point.

While the cookie was baking we went upstairs to do our "C" scavenger hunt. Here are a few things we found!

Our Completed Cookie! ha ha

It was delicious. :)

Great day. 3 letters down and 23 more to go. We are taking a day or two off to review after we have learned A-F. We will see how well she is retaining them!

Letter of the Day ----> B!

Today was "B" day! And it was a Beautiful day of learning. Ha ha. :)For Breakfast we started the day Baking Blueberry muffins. The first batch we made I inadvertently used expired all-purpose flour and it tasted awful. Guess it shows how much baking I do. But I did have whole wheat flour so we salvaged the blueberries and tried again with a new batch. It turned out very yummy and the kids loved them!

After breakfast, we did a few activities on the iPad and then we were ready to head outside for Bubbles! B is for Bubbles!

After a Break for lunch, Myla and I made her Bumble Bee craft. Didn't take long at all...Myla thought it was fun doing the stripes!

We later went upstairs for our "B" scavenger hunt and found some things in the Bathroom! Bubble machine, Bathtub, and Brother! Yes, we labled Noah :)

Then we were off to her Bedroom to search some more. Here is what we found...

Before naptime (thank God for naptime), Myla found her "B"s and wrote her B on her Abc strip. We also discovered we were all wearing Blue!

By the end of the day, she was noticing "B" on different books and signs. So fun to see her getting excited about learning. She did say before bed time that she couldn't wait for her "C" activities tomorrow! I better think of something clever before then!

Letter of the Day Activities Starts Here!

Check out the right hand side of the page to find all the posts in the Letter of the Day series! -----------> 

Also, feel free to leave comments on how you are teaching your little one letters. I welcome the ideas!

Letter of the Day -------> A!

We started our letter of the day actvities today and had an Awesome time! We began with having apple slices with our breakfast. :)

   

 Myla noticed some "A"s on Noah's placemat so we circled those. Noah kept saying "A!" throughout the rest of breakfast.

 
 After telling Myla that we would be doing some Letter A activities she was so excited she barely finished breakfast. We brought her apple slices to the table to start our first one. We used a Letter App on the iPad to practice tracing them. She wanted to do all the letters!

 
The next activity was playing with our super cool Alphie toy. We just did the Letter A card, of course.

 

 Her favorite activity was making the Alligator out of our letter. Turned out so cute and she was so proud!(Just tilt your head to the side to see that it is an alligator!)

Later in the day, we worked with the magnetic letters on a cookie sheet (It's nice being a teacher and already having most of these materials from my classroom!)She first picked out all the "A"s but that was a little too easy for her. So the next time I had her take off all the letters that were not an "A". Cute video of this but it's not uploading right. Ugh, I'll try again later.

   

 Next, found this idea on Pinterest so I can't take full credit...paper towel tube with letters on them. Myla took the "A" letter stickers and placed them on the "A"s on the tube. There were only 4 so this didn't take long! But I have letters B-E on there so we will use it for a few days. By then, I am sure I will have an empty paper towel tube to do more letters.

 

Then we took our "A" labels for a scavenger hunt in her room. On a mission to find things in her room that started with an A. A lot harder than I thought, especially since Myla isn't as knowledgeable in this area yet. She can certainly identify but is not sure about thinking of words with the sounds yet. So after searching and searching here's what we found!! Angel, Ants, Ape, (2) Animal books, Aquaphor and an Apple from her kitchen stuff.

 

 We then made a chart of all the words we found.

 

 And lastly, we started our alphabet strip with Myla writing her letter of the day. We will write all the letters on it to hang up in her room when we are done with all the letters. Now, the question is...can I keep this up for 25 more days?? I plan on it. It was fun for me too! I guess I will still be teaching a little this summer after all. The highlight of my day was when I asked what she liked best about the whole day. She thought for a second and I started to list the different activities we did and she piped up and said, "No, the best part of the day was playing with my mommy!" I am so grateful to have the summer to spend with my sweet girl!! She makes me so happy!

It's SUMMER time!

So maybe that means I will have more time to blog?! I do plan on documenting the summer but can't make any promises. But I will start! However, I am just 3 days into the summer and already feeling quite productive. I've started on a few projects around the house, organized some areas that really needed organizing, and tomorrow Myla and I will start our Letter of the Day!! I haven't been able to work with Myla very much on her letters and her preschool last year didn't do a whole lot. She is super interested in letters write now pointing out those she recognizes and finding her "name" everywhere she sees a "M", "Y", "L", or an "A". So with her being out for the summer as well, I figured this would be the perfect time to intro and review the ABCs. I will try and remember that Summer for a teacher should be relaxing and not filled with too many projects since we are OVERWHELMED with numerous projects during the school year. But I have quickly learned that being productive makes me happy! I am not happy when I am sitting around for too long. The thought of having the time to do things around the house, clean the way I want to clean, actually cook a good meal, spend quality time with my kids...makes me giddy!! I. love. summer.

Wordle Fun