Preschool, Letter C Week

Our verse was, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth."  We used "The Memory Bible" by Stephen Elkins for our verse, lesson reference, and verse song on Day 1, and the cd was used through the week.

We made our letter C crab.

We read "The Cow Loves Cookies" by Karma Wilson (2 of Stevie's favorite C things).  We ripped and glued the cow's spots, and he helped me draw and color cookies!

 We read books about cars.  I especially liked "Cars: Rushing! Honking! Zooming!" by Patrcia Hubbell.  He drove his cars on the laminated C...we pretended there was a bridge at the end of the C and lifted the car up to start back over at the top of the C.

Stevie is in love with "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" by Eric Carle, so we made a fuzzy caterpillar with a clothespin, pom poms, and google eyes.  I made a simple leaf, laminated it, and punched holes for the caterpillar to follow either on top or chomping with the clothespin.  I tried to make the holes in a C shape...always reinforcing our letter.

 You could also give your child some leaves to punch on their own. This is a great fine motor task, but Stevie isn't quite ready for it yet...it's too frustrating still to use the puncher.
We also have colored circles of construction paper.  Make long caterpillars and count the circles, or make patterns.

Of course, we had to do more with cookies!  This was a cute book, actually a big book I snatched from a garage sale for 50 cents!  These children make cookies...it goes through the process and ingredients.  It ties in with the C theme and also "creating"...our C word "created" from our verse.  After reading, we made our own chocolate chip cookies and enjoyed them!

 

Here are most of the items in our C box that were explored throughout the week.  This is still one of Stevie's favorite parts of our school routine.

 This was our pocket chart for the week that included our verse stick and pocket flashcard...I took our C families out of the picture for privacy. :). The sticks are now in our Abc verse and prayer pail!

Sprinkle C Activities:

*Cutting play food/veggies.  We have some plastic veggies with velcro to cut, another win from a garage sale.

*Play-doh to create and cut. Also use cookie cutters.

*Snack on animal crackers and crackers. (...or cookies, cupcakes, cake...)

*Have a celebration

*Cook pretend or real meals together

*Look for real caterpillars

*Notice all different colors of cars

*Practice being caring and compassionate

*Make cards for C friends we prayed for

*Brown construction paper circles with numbers beside or below them.  Stevie puts 1,2,3,...chocolate chips on the "cookie."  At the end, he got to eat the chocolate chips!

The idea isn't to sit down and check all of these off my list one by one.  I have these ideas that are easy to sprinkle in our day when we need an extra activity, or they just happen spontaneously, and we make the C connection.  That's what it's all about. Finding and practicing what we're learning through everyday life-living and through things...and using some other inexpensive ways to have fun learning our letter and God's Word.  This is one aspect I'm loving about homeschooling.  I know exactly what he's learning, and it just flows through our whole day.  It's awesome!

You are probably noticing how there are a lot more activities this week.  Stevie is just loving school.  I still focus on 2 organized school days, but he asks for school every day.  Since he does, we keep it short and simple, and I have to have a lot of ideas on stand-by.  I didn't mention it earlier, but we're still including prayer, the calendar, and the weather chart with songs.  Stevie loves using a pointer!