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!~~

All about "I"

My daughter has not been interested in doing "school" for a couple of weeks so we have gotten a little behind with our letters. However, it proved to be a good break for both of us.  I also was able to work with my three older boys a little more on some new to them topics. 

Now we have gotten back into the swing of things and have worked through the letter "I". 

Studying the letter "I" would not be the same if we didn't have ice cream at least once!  And what is even better is making our own. 

The snow has been melting in my neck of the country so there are lots and lots of icicles to spot dripping off the roof!

Despite the snow melting it was still too cold to be outside so we stayed inside all week playing indoor games(like hide n seek, dress-up and tea parties)

Along with playing indoor games we made and played with instruments. We learned that there are lots of different things that can be made into musical instruments.

We talked about insects.  We made ladybugs, butterflies, and other bugs using our thumbprint and an ink pad.

Our Bible lesson was on Issac.

We did take the time to talk about the short i sound and the long i sound.  We made up two mini books with each of the I sounds.

We didn't get to one thing that I wanted to do....that was making an igloo out of sugar cubes!

**I hope you take the time to go through the valuable links in this post!**

All about "H"

This week for my 13 Things Thursday, I am going to share some of the highlights of what my kindergartener and I have done for "H week". If you are new to my blog, I have been going through the alphabet with my daughter for kindergarten. We are doing a letter each week. Without further ado....

1. We learned about Hearts. We listened to each other's heart. We drew and cut out hearts. We learned about being happy and how that helps our heart. 
   
   
   
   
2. We learned about houses. We built a fort with blankets and pretended it was a house. We also learned that animals have homes too.  
   
   
3. We learned about heat!  Heat is a good thing to have in a house when the temperature outside is below zero degrees!
   
   
4. We learned about heaven.  Heaven is a place that we will be going to someday!  As my daughter said, "Heaven is Jesus' home right now but I'll live there someday."
   
   
5. Our Bible lesson was about Hannah.
   
   
6. We learned about staying healthy.  We did exercises to make our heart go faster.  We learned about healthy foods. 
   
   
7. We learned about hiberation. This was a big word for a kindergartener so we talked about how it is what some animals do in the winter.  My daughter's first reaction when I told her the meaning of hiberation was...."Can we watch Over the Hedge? The bear on there was hiberating when RJ took his food!"
   
   
   
   
8. We did lots of different things with our hands!  We did hand painting (fingerpainting). We did handprints. We talked about how God created everyone's hand prints different.  I found this handprint ice cream cone for one of our crafts this week. 
   
   
9. We had fun playing with our hair!  How many hair accessories can we fit in our hair?!
   
   
10. We watched hippos swim in the water at the National Geographic's Creature Feature!
    
    
11. We ate hamburgers, hotdogs, and ham slices. We could have had honey this week but she doesn't like the taste!
    
    
12. We read the story of The Little Red Hen.
    
    
13. We sang the Hokey Pokey while wearing fancy hats!

Head over to Happy To Be at Home for more Thursday Thirteen lists!

All about "G"

This past week we got back into the swing of school and that included my kindergartener.  We learned the letter G!

It wouldn't be "G" week at my house if we did not read the book the Green Eggs & Ham at least a couple times during the week!  I am not sure why my kids love this story about trying to get someone to eat green eggs & ham but they do so it is a favorite around here!  Funny thing is I can't get them to eat the green eggs!  
Grapes are one of the favorite fruits around here!  We like them fresh rather than frozen!

Graham crackers were fun to eat this week but taking frosting and making homemade "stick cookies". 

We learned about gems. We learned about glasses and talked about different people that wear them. 

For Bible class we read the story about David and the Goliath the Giant!

We talked about the color green. 

It is cold outside so we wore gloves to keep our hands warm.

Our science for the week was learning about giraffes.

Stay tuned for our "H Week", we are talking about hair, hearts, and heaven!

All about "F"

After a couple of weeks of being busy, my daughter and I worked on the letter "F" this week.

We talked about how to escape the house if there was a fire. We talked about not playing with the gas stove or with matches and candles.

We read and talked about two different things from the Bible...Feeding the 5,000 and the fruit of spirit.

We colored several different flags and even talked about the difference of our state flag and the USA flag.

We ate french fries, french toast with a fork, and fruit.

We played leap frog with friends and football with brothers.

We looked at books and colored pictures of flowers and fish. While we were at the doctor's office last week we watched the fish in the fish tank!

We spent time together with family and talked about some day living on a farm.

We did up a mini book on words that start with F along with other letter F activities.

We finished off the week with putting together a file folder into a shutterbook of letter F pictures.

All about "E"

We have gotten a little behind with our letters! I have been busy with household duties and getting my older boys back on track with their schooling so my daughter and I have not done "school" every day.

Anyway, here is a list of things that we have done for the letter "E".

We talked about our planet, Earth. We did pages from the space theme over at Learning Page(to access the pages become a member for free). The pages were talking about the moon going around the Earth, the planet Earth is the third planet and identifying Earth from other objects. We talked about the fact that we live on planet, Earth and that God created it. Our verse for the week was Genesis 1:1.

The number we worked on was "eleven". We counted different objects up to eleven along with learning how to write two ones close enough together so that someone knows it is "11" and not two separate ones.

We talked about "ears" and how they are needed for listening. A common question around here this past week was "Are you using your ears to listen?" I also showed her that different living things have different kinds of ears. Human ears are different from elephant ears. Dog ears are different from bunny ears.

We also put together both the "short e" and "long e" books that were in the First School's E Lesson Plans.

We talked about envelopes and what goes in envelopes. We also talked about mail carriers because according to my daughter they carry alot of envelopes!

And what would the letter E be without talking about elephants! We walked around like elephants! (sorry no pics of that! LOL)

We also watched Sesame Street to see Ernie and Elmo!

We ate eggs and egg noodles. I was going to make homemade egg noodles this week but got too busy so we just ate store bought ones.

I hope that this gives you some ideas as to what activities you can do with your preschooler or kindergartener where they are learning and you are not having to "break the bank"!

All about "D"

The week was a little too busy to get everything in that I wanted to do so I let her play more than doing "school".

We read books about dinosaurs, dress-up, ducks and dogs.

We talked about the dentist and the doctor.

For our Bible stories this week, we talked about Daniel and David.

We played with dominos and dress-up. We dressed in clothes with dots.

We did our "D" book. We also colored pictures of "d" things like dog, duck, drum and dress.

We ate donuts, and dipped carrots in ranch sauce.

I am going to finish up "D" on Monday with us putting together our "D Lapbook". Then it will be on to "E" with elephants, and eggs!

All about "C"

This week, my daughter's favorite activity was taking M&M candies to do counting and sorting by colors. (because I let her eat them when we were done!)

Other things we did this week was read the book Circle City and then did up our own circle book with pictures of tires, faces, and donuts.

We made a C mini book, and instead of writing the whole word on the lines in the book. She is just writing a big "C" and a little "c".

We did lots of counting and coloring this week! Along with reading books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar, C is for Clown, Chrysanthemum, The Little Cookie, If You Give A Mouse a Cookie, and a couple about Clifford.

I made little C word flashcards using C word book from abcteach. I changed my printer to resize the pages so that all 6 pages were on 1 page! Then I printed the page on white card stock and cut them out for her to color and use and also made a little pocket for them in her "C Lapbook".

Our Bible story this week was about Moses and the 10 Commandments.

We ate cake, cookies, carrots and candy for snacks. I know not very healthy in the snack department!

All about "B"

This week in kindergarten was all about the letter "B"!

We read a "B" book each day... The Berenstains' B Book; Busy Boats; Animal Babies; A Day in the Life of a Baby Bear; Bears on Wheels.
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We put together a boat.

We talked about bees and how God created them for a special purpose just like He created us for a special purpose. We put together a "B" book.

We colored butterflies, books, bananas. We watched birds and talked about what they eat.

We colored with blue, brown, and black. We learned the difference between "b" and "d".




We ate bananas and beans.

At the end of the week, we decorated a "B" with "b" word stickers.

Aside from working on "B", we memorized 1 Corinthians 15:3-4 for AWANA.

All about "A"

Finally, I think I have my schedule down where I can get started with schooling my kindergartener. We worked at learning about "A" this week. We talked about apples, and ants.

I got books about ants from the library from the list on the ants lapbook. I read a book to her each day about the ants.

We ate apples and applesauce.

We traced "A" and "a". We colored pictures of ants, apples and "A". We did a dot-to-dot apple to work on counting and recognizing our numbers to 10.

When we were putting the picture to match the word in our letter "A" book, I had her tell me each of the letters in the word to see what letters she recognized in each word. This way she is realizing that words represent things not just pictures.

Instead of doing a lapbook on just ants, we made it represent our "A" week.

Aside from doing "A" this week, we also worked on 1 John 4:14 and Psalm 147:5 for Awana.

Homeschooling Little Ones--Pre-K/Kindergarten Curriculum

In my series, Homeschooling with Little Ones, I have covered my game plan with a new baby, keeping toddlers occupied, training of toddlers and my daily routine. I am going to close the series with giving you an overview of what I am going to be doing with my daughter(will be 5 in December) this school year. Last year we worked on getting this preschool list accomplished, along with fun and playful activities.

To start out our year, we are going to focus on a different letter of the alphabet. I haven’t decided if we are going to do a letter per week or every two weeks. I also haven't decided if we are going to go in ABC order because some letters are easier to write/trace than others. I am going to be doing some of the activities that I found at Letter of the Week along with other activites that I have linked below.

Here is a list of the different things we are going to study with the alphabet…

A= Apples, Angels, and Ants Lapbook
B= Birds, Blue, Bees and Butterfly Lapbook
C= Circle Shape Book with C Words, carrots, caterpillars , and cars
D= Dogs, Ducks, and Dolls
E= Earth, Eggs, and Elephants
F= Fruit, Fish, Flowers, Feathers, Flag, fire safety, and Frogs
Visit a Fire Station, Collect Pictures of Flowers
G= Girl, Green, Grapes
H= Heart, and House
I= Ice Cream, and Indians
J= Jewelry, Jello, Jumprope, and Jungle
K= Kites, King, Kangaroo, Kindness, Kitchen
L= Ladybugs, Lions, Library and Lambs
Visit the Library
M= Music, Monkey, Money, and Manners
N= Nursery rhymes, Nurse, and Neighborhood
O= Oceans, Orange, Owls, and Opposites
P= Popcorn, Pizza, Princess, and Penguins
Q= Queen, Quilt, and Quiet
R= Rainbow, and Rocks
S= Senses, Stranger Safety, Strawberries and Stars
T= Trains, Tiger, Tomatoes, and Teeth
U= Umbrella, and Uncle
V= Violets, Vacation, and Vegetables
W= Winter, Whales, and Wagon
X= Xray, Fox, and Box
Y= Yellow, YoYo, Yarn, Yogurt
Z= Zoo, Zebra
Visit the Zoo

Along with the alphabet, we are going to do unit study/theme units at Reading A-Z which will cover Math(shapes, numbers), Language Arts, Handwriting, and Science. (There is a required free membership in order to see all their pages.)

Any kind of Reading Readiness will be from reading lots of library books together and Starfall. Towards the middle of the year, I will be working more with Phonics, sight words and Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons.

Bible will be activities from Bible ABC's, Awana, and ABC Memory Verses. We will also be working on character education thru books and activities. We will also be working with learning the fruit of the spirit.

Aside from the learning page for Handwriting, I will be using tracing exercises in jello, finger paints, sand, and whipping cream and also using tracing sheets from handwriting worksheet generator and worksheets to help with word and letter spacing and handwriting for kids.

Here is a list of other early childhood resources.

**Stay tuned for our journey thru the curriculum...our accomplishments, our skips, and our additions to our fun filled year.