All about "J"

I have been working with my 6 yo daughter learning to read that I haven't take the time to post about our weekly letter focus in a while. Now having a 3 1/2 year old son that is asking questions about letters in the words he sees because of sitting in when I am working with my daughter, I thought it would be good to start sharing again our weekly letter focus.

Before we took our spring break, we focused on the letter "J".

It was fun to have the help in the kitchen while we made some jello jigglers(follow recipe on gelatin box or   follow Amy's recipe) to enjoy for an afternoon snack. It is easy to cut these shapes out with different cookie cutters or just free hand with a plastic knife.  We also has bread and jam one day for an afternoon snack.

One rainy afternoon, my daughter and I got out the beads and worked at making jewelry to wear or have for her dress-up bin.  Jewelry Making Crafts for Kids and  Disney Family Fun Bead Jewelry are a couple of websites that have different patterns of bead jewelry to do with kids.

With Easter candy on store shelves it made it easy to find some jelly beans to use in our fun for the week! We took a virtual tour of a Jelly Belly factory. We read the book "Jelly Beans For Sale" by Bruce MacMillan We did some color sorting by doing this poem.

"Jelly Bean Prayer"

Red is for the blood He gave.

Green is for the grass He made.

Yellow is for the sun so bright.

Orange is for the edge of night.

Black is for the sins we made.

White is for the grace He gave.

Purple is for His hour of sorrow.

Pink is for our new tomorrow.

An egg full of jelly beans, Colorful and Sweet

Is a prayer, a promise, A loved one's treat!!

Charlene Dickensen, 1997

Our Bible lessons were about Jesus and all He did while on this earth, including dying for us and raising from the dead, we also talked about other people in the Bible whose name started with "J" like Jacob, Joseph, Jonah and Joshua.  

We talked about jets, made jungle animals, and colored a picture of Jupiter.

We colored a girl jumping rope and then went outside to jump rope to get the wiggles out!

I know there is a lot more we could have done for the letter "J" but I try to only focus on a certain letter for five days for about a half hour each day. This way they are learning and getting exposure to the letter while having some fun. 

Got any more ideas?? What are some other "J" things I could have covered with my younger ones?  I would love to have more ideas as I am sure that we will be going through the alphabet again next year with my 3 1/2 year old.

~~there is some great resources via the links in this post!~~