Week 2: Letter A

Our second week of school (first full week) we started with the letter A.  Jenna still really enjoyed herself and loved seeing what activities we had planned for the day.  I use the pink, purple, and white bins behind Jenna in the picture below to store the activities - one activity per bin.  She loves peeking in the bins early and will come running to tell me (while giggling) that she peeked.  :)  I just love seeing her excitement!

So here are some pictures from our week:

Jenna colored the letter A page (boy do we need to work on staying in the lines) and traced the letters.

There's an awesome educational website that has activities for each letter of the alphabet, as well as numbers, colors, nursery rhymes, etc.  So she did the Letter A activities on the website. 

I thought the kids would enjoy playing in shaving cream and in the process Jenna could work on writing her A's.  In theory it was a good idea, but I forgot Jenna doesn't always care for her hands to get messy.  She did it a little bit, but wasn't that into it.  Grant on the other hand loved it!

She used a Dot-a-Dot marker to dot all the A's on the papers.  She actually did REALLY well and didn't need my help. 

A cutting practice page.  It appears Jenna's a leftie, so I imagine I probably need to get her some left-handed scissors.  I don't think she did too bad for being a beginner.

She had to match the numbers with the correct number of seeds in the apples.  She did most of the page on her own and only needed my help recognizing a few of the numbers.

Of course we had to have an apple tasting.  I bought one of each different apple at the grocery store, labeled the bottom of the plates with the kind of apple and then sliced them up for us to try.

Interestingly enough, out of the six apples we tried, there are two that we typically buy...and neither of those were picked as Jenna's favorites. She narrowed down her favorites to three - Fuji, Red Delicious, and Braeburn. 

Jenna's cut and paste page.  She had to cut out apples and then glue them on the tree.  I was impressed with her scissor skills on this activity.  She did a good job of cutting close to the apples.

Letter A Poke page - Jenna used a toothpick and poked holes along the black lines.  Then afterward we held it up to the light.

Apple lacing card - I had left the room to tend to Grant while she was working on this and came back to her finished project.  Not bad!

Jenna matched uppercase and lowercase letters to her APPLE letter page.  It was fairly easy for her - she just got tricked up once by the letter b, wanting to make it a p.

We also did some apple stamping where we cut some apples in half, dipped them in paint, and then stamped them on the paper.  Of course after that they wanted to do some of their own painting.  :)

The apple stamping

Matching capital A's and lowercase A's

Apple size sort - This is something she needs more practice with.  She found it difficult to pick out the "biggest" apple or the "next biggest" one.  I guess the terminology was new to her and a little confusing.

More writing practice

Another area she struggled with was completing a pattern.  It was completely over her head and left her very confused.  Those patterns can be tricky!  ;)

She matched the shapes and then told me what each of the shapes were.

These alphabet cards and Wikki Stix were a gift from "B" and will be great practice with our alphabet unit. 

Jenna has an alphabet book and she'll decorate each letter with something that starts with that letter (or at least that's the goal).  So this week she used apple stickers.

Do-a-Dot page - used her Do-a-Dot markers to fill in the bubbles for capital and lowercase A