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Alphabet Week #1 - Full Alphabet & Letter A Activity

We're off to a crawl on the home lessons, but I finally mustered up the energy to pull together a couple learning activities for the boys.

Again, we'll go through the alphabet, since we didn't start on "A" last time around and because Cid still needs some work on his letters. Rowan could also use some help with lower case letters, though I'm hoping to get him into more reading and math this time around.

First, we started with a lower case alphabet tracing page.

I pulled this one off the web for free:

Lower Case Alphabet Printable

The boys don't care for these letter tracing activities too much. I put them out there anyway. But to make it a bit more exciting for them, I gave them cardboard alphabet stickers to stick on when they were done tracing. (if you don't have alphabet stickers, maybe cut out letters from a magazine).

My intention was to have them find all the letters of the alphabet in the stickers and stick them on, but they decided to do their names instead. Rowan tried to spell out some other things with the stickers and Cid just went crazy with them. I'm still counting it as a win!

We also did a Letter A activity, which I've attached a template for below.

For this activity, all you really need is the printouts below, pen(s), scissors, and glue. The boys traced the capital "A" and connected the dots for a lower case "a". Then they pasted the solid letter cutouts on their traced letters. They liked this one. In hindsight, I should have put the dot-to-dot numbers CCW from #1 so that they mimicked the writing motion of the lower case letter "a". Otherwise, another win!

Note: for the solid letters, I cut them from colored construction paper, but I've attached a page that can either be printed and cut to use as is, or can be printed and used as a template to cut out construction paper letters. If you don't want to waste printer ink (it's pricey!), just print an extra trace page and use that as the template for the solid letter cutouts.

Solid Letters A for cutting out Printable

Letter A Trace and Dot-to-Dot Printable

Enjoy!

~Sarah

Tuesday, April 7, 2015

Today is Brought to You by the Number Twelve! {Including a Clock Activity}

by Sarah

1 Comment

I'm flying solo this week.

As in, my mom's preschool is on Spring Break, so I mostly have to come up with my own learning shizz to do with the kiddos.

I bought a white board at Wal-Mart which has already been a worthy investment. And since we ended with "Z" a couple weeks ago, it seemed appropriate to start with "A" yesterday. When I asked the kids to think of things that start with the letter A, they immediately said "apple!", then the rest of the letter sesh was spent drawing penguins and made up dinosaurs on the white board. Again, we are very loosely following any structure.

This morning Rowan wrote the number "12" on the board. We went with it.

I showed them 12 Easter eggs in a carton and we talked about the word "dozen", threw in some quick math by taking half the eggs out of the carton for a "half dozen".

But the real winner was gluing numbers on a clock face. I found a simple blank clock face clipart online and made some colorful numbers to cut out and glue on the face. Kids totally dug it.

Super easy! And to make it easier, I added some templates below. The sizing should be about right when printed.

You need:
Plain paper
Construction paper
Glue
Brad (or tack w/ some sort of backing)

Instructions:

It's simple. Print the templates below. Cut the numbers out. Glue them on the clock. Cut the clock hands out of construction paper & pin them to the center with a brad so they move. Done.

Printable Clock Template

Numbers and Hands Template

A few tips:

1) I threw the Sesame Street pinball song on Youtube while I put together my little clock activities (I sing this song in my head every time I count numbers with the kids....yeah). That gave me enough time to find a free blank clipart clock face online.

2) I was originally going to have the kids trace the numbers (which you can totally do) but since my kids are forced to do a lot of that, I decided to draw some colorful numbers and cut them out for the littles to glue in place. They LOVE to glue. Probably because I dislike it.

3) Depending on the age, you can have the dotted numbers on the clock or have them figure it out themselves. Mine needed the traceable numbers. They both did great with minimal help from me, even Cid.

4) If you don't have brads (mom fail!) then you can use my ghetto tack trick. I stuck the tack through the paper and into cardboard. A cork would work GREAT for this, which I'm sure plenty of us moms have lying around....I just happened to be fresh out.