Apples

A new letter! We love getting to Mondays and
going over a new letter!

This week is the letter A, specifically the short a sound – apples, ants, alligators. We’ll cover the long A sound later on.

Book

Ten Apples Up On Top!

You know I’m a fan of Dr. Seuss and I do love a rhyming book. Aside

“Mom, why is the bear so mad?”

“Because these three troublemakers took apples out of her fridge without asking first.”

“Oh. It’s not good to take things that don’t belong to you.”

“Nope. It sure isn’t.”

Flashcards

We now have FOUR flashcards to review! And they’re remembering the old ones so well.

They picked “apple” as our word for Aa.

And then they wanted to try and balance ten apples on their heads. Luckily, I didn’t have that many.

Song

We used the “I like to eat apples and bananas” song again today. Marginally better success than the banana day; probably because we’re a few weeks in now and we’re getting used to the structure and routine.

The only thing that I didn’t like about using this song today is that it uses the long A sound instead of the short one.

Also, I may have mentioned this before, but I remember this song differently than the video. I remember singing ALL vowel sounds in the whole thing as the vowel sound for that verse. So, instead of “I like to eat, eat, eat, āpples and bānānās,” it was “Ā lāke tā āte, āte, āte, āpples and bānānās,” repeated for every vowel. We sang it my way because it was more fun that way.

Tracing Page

We used this tracing page from Education.com today. I like that it broke the pieces of the letter down individually and had them practice the pieces before putting them all together. I think it was a good intro one for the other two coming later this week.

Activity

I found this activity on Pinterest (surprise, surprise).

I liked this one because it also worked their fine motor skills. I let them pick what color to make their apples and then tear the paper themselves. We used small paper plates because I know that these two have a pretty short attention span and I didn’t want to fight with them to finish their apples.

We also gave them each a glue stick and let them practice gluing the pieces down themselves. Mixed results. At first they were somewhat careful and were making sure to get glue on the pieces. By the end, though, they were barely touching the scraps with the glue sticks and thinking they were going to magically stick to the plate by themselves. We had to take over on the glue when they decided to start trying to stick scraps to the table.

I’d precut the stems and the leaves so that they wouldn’t be sitting around waiting for us to cut them out when they were done with the other pieces.

I think they turned out pretty cute.

All Done!

It’s looking like Mondays are going to be our good days. The kids seem to be ready for preschool on Mondays after two days off. Hopefully that continues!

Aa – Apples