Letter "Aa" Week

Since Abby is still only two (close to three now though!), I figured the “letter a week” approach would be a solid way to start our preschool year.  Yes, she already knows her letters and sounds, but I figured a refresher course wouldn’t be a bad idea since she isn’t quite ready for learning to read.🙂

Here I will provide you with everything we did for our "Aa Week."  You can pick and choose ideas and go through at your own pace.

We start each week with the corresponding letter board book out of a set we own.  This helps reinforce the letter name and sound.  I will reread our letter "Aa" book each day this week.

I show Abby how to draw the letter of the week on a blank piece of paper and guide her through the process.  There are more and more letters she can write on her own and she loves when she figures out a new one!  I think this is a great way to help her start focusing on pencil control and thinking about writing.  She has been a lot more excited about writing lately and loves practicing in her drawing notebook.  She will sit over on the kitchen floor carefully writing letters and running over to show me each and every one as it’s finished.  The last few days she has really shown a lot of improvement!

Crafts are always a major highlight with Abs.  We read about apples and then cut one open to see the star inside.

Save your seeds to glue inside a block letter “A” (save these in advance as there aren’t very many from just one apple!).  Abby ate half of the apple for a snack and used the other half to do some apple printing.  It was a little messy, but she loved it!  We stamped on multiple pages.  This was her neatest page as she started sliding her apple around after a bit to experiment. haha

Life of an apple tree sequencing cards were a fun, related activity.

Here was our first block letter, full of apple seeds!🍎🍏

A is for ant.  We made thumbprint ants (washable ink stamp pad) and practiced drawing short lines and counting to six for the legs.  We read, "Let's Take a Field Trip to an Ant Colony" by Kathy Furgang beforehand.

Ants on a log was the perfect snack for our ant day (celery, peanut butter, and raisin "ants").  We went outside and studied an anthill too!

This was one of Abby’s favorite crafts because painting is so fun!  She made an alligator clothespin.  Watch out because he can really open his mouth and "bite"!  I had her let it dry after each color to keep it slightly less messy.  We looked up some fun, informative alligator clips on Youtube too.

This final idea is something we'll do each week.  A color, cut, and glue page of things that start with the letter "A!"  I helped her with the cutting, but as she gets better with scissors, she'll take that over.👍