Mini Alphabet Books



S loves these printable mini alphabet books from DLTK.  They aren't very printer/paper/ink friendly, but he has really enjoyed them so I'll continue to print one each week.  There's so much more on this site you can check out as well!

I'm (maybe) back!

No commitment or promise.  Let's just see how this goes.  It's been almost a YEAR since I went "on hiatus" and while we have been busy the past year, I'll just catch you up to what we've been up to in the past WEEK...

I is for Igloo.  Since the start of the school year, we've been working on a letter each week...or two weeks...or four when a new baby is born :)  My mom got us the cardboard letters from Lakeshore (can't find an online link), but you could easily cut your own out.  After S paints them we cover them in stickers that begin with that letter.  S looks forward to this each week and wants to race through the whole alphabet.  After we finish these, I plan to do these cute alphabet animals, but wanted to wait until S's cutting skills were stronger for these. 

This past week, we were on "I" (Does anybody else get frustrated with the whole uppercase I that looks like a lowercase l thing?) and since we are also learning about ice, snow, igloos, penguins, polar bears, etc, we made this igloo from a styrofoam bowl and "iceblock" Avery labels.  We also used some packing peanuts as snow.  I plan to add penguin and polar bear figurines to our little play scene. 

We've also been reading two bible stories each week.  When we got this bible, I went through the table of contents and marked which months we would read certain stories, using Easter and Christmas as guides which puts us towards the beginning of the Old Testament right now reading "Miracles of Jesus" stories.  I haven't gotten very creative with these yet, but S is enjoying these coloring pages for each story (the second page of each link). 

Letter Matching.  S has enjoyed matching upper case letters with lower case letters.  We use Fridge Phonics letters and an alphabet chart I made awhile back.  We are also enjoying using these alphabet blocks to match letters on an ABC poster from Dollar Tree. 

I'll stop there for now.  We'll call this a trial period...

Heart Letter Search

I printed this blank heart mat from a site I just discovered (and love) called Prekinders.  Note:  I am adding it to my resource list.  I then added some letters that S is familiar with to create a "letter search".  We used a different color of dot marker to mark each letter.  I modeled this for him to begin (some of the S's) and then had him point to the letters before he marked them himself.  As you can see, his attention span did not last for the entire activity, so next time I will cut the mat in half. 

Thanks, Activity Mom, for the site!

Dot Letters

I have been wanting to print and try this activity with S for a long time now.  MakingLearningFun.com has printable letter magnet pages.  You are suppose to use them with little colored dot magnets, but I used them with our dot art markers.  S has completed "S is for school" and "V is for Valentines".  I plan to bind them together in a book when we finish all the letters.  I like that there are several choices per letter and they also have pages to go with Brown Bear, Brown Bear and The Very Hungry Caterpillar. 

Thanks, 1+1+1+=1!

Coloring Pages

My sister told me about http://www.thecolor.com/, an online coloring book.  The pages are broken down by theme and they have lots of themes to choose from.  You can "color" online, but you can also print out blank pages which is what I have done with S.  You could also print out a whole theme and staple them together to make a coloring book.  Here are my favorites:

• 
  
  Numbers
• 
  
  Alphabet
• 
  
  Aesop's Fables
• 
  
  Grimm's Fairy Tales
• 
  
  Nursery Rhymes
• 
  
  Valentine's Day

Thanks, Kelly!