Homeschool Preschool: The Letter A

As I promised in this post, I’m here to give a round-up of how our first week of homeschool preschool went. If you’re not into that kind of thing feel free to stick around for pictures of my adorable children. ;)

Our first week was ‘A’ week.

We start off each Monday with these Do-A-Dot letter sheets. They are the favorite of both kids. Sometimes we do the dollar store rocks and then the markers but both kids agree that these are fun. I don’t usually recommend kind of expensive art materials but these markers are amazing. We tried the bingo markers from the dollar store and quickly found out they’re not washable. If you use a 40% Michaels coupon you can get the Do-A-Dots for a reasonable price.

Thanks to garage sales, thrift stores, used book sales, and library discards we have a pretty decent home library for the kids. We did go to the library together to get the alligator and crocodile book because I knew Lucy would enjoy it.

To go along with that book and the AlphaTales cd that is on repeat in our van [no, really. Sorry Chuck!] we did this craft. I saw it on this site, they have something for every letter so it’s a great resource.

We’re doing letter practice each week. I think it’ll be really fun to look back on it in 6 months and see how her penmanship has improved. Honestly, I see a huge difference in just the two weeks we’ve been going at it. Right now we’re mostly working on tracing, though she is practicing free-handing her name.

We used our gems and some ice cube trays to practice sequencing.

Landon was there, too. ;)

I’m not sure it’s normal for a 3.5 year old but this kid has some serious spatial reasoning skills so her “fun” activity one day was a set of tangram cards I found at the dollar store last year. We put drawer liner under the shapes to keep them from sliding down and remove any frustration that might cause.

We read 10 Apples Up On Top and tried out this activity. I thought she’d definitely like it because it involves using a glue stick but it failed. We tried it a few different times [because sometimes it’s just how she feels on a given day] but no dice. So we might try these the next time we work through the letter ‘A’.

Our games for the week included Deja Moo!. It’s pretty much a matching game but the cards are face up and they’re of the same cow but just a little different. So, for example, you’d have to find the match where both cows are wearing sunglasses.

Ruk Shuk is a favorite of the adults of this house, but Lucy likes to pretend she’s playing by correctily ordering the rocks horizontally [instead of stacking them].

Castle Logix is just the right amount of puzzling logic for her. It has different levels of ability so it’ll last her a while. Which is good because we have a box full of 24 piece puzzles she’s discarded.

Landon likes to get in on the action sometimes. He wanted to help unload the dishwasher so I set him to the task of organizing the sippy cups.

Our fun ended with a “tea” party outside that included mulch and water. Yum.