The Iowa Farmer's Wife: Tot Preschool: Letter Aa

Sweet P is 28 mos old

We started off our year of tot preschool last week with Letter Aa. I talked to Sweet P a lot about tot school the week before so she was ready to play lots of new "games."

About a month before we started, we began a new morning routine that involved our "days" as we call it. So we normally tell her "let's go do our days" and head down to the school room in the basement. I have a simple calendar with perpetual calendar tiles (she puts the number in each day), yesterday, today and tomorrow cards and weather cards that all hang on the wall. I found a great song to sing with the days and we just started that this week (Letter Bb). After our days we pray, say the Our Father and the Pledge of Allegiance. I'm glad I started this before we started tot school because now she is prepared to do that first when we go downstairs.

Our verse for Letter Aa didn't start with A, but our verses will begin with the letter we are doing that week in a few weeks.

"Jesus said, "If you love me, obey me." John 14:15

We started with Letter Aa and plan to work our way through the alphabet. We spend about an hour each morning doing "school." We do other activities that start with the letter throughout the day, but the time in the basement is considered school time. I don't have the camera while we do school because I don't want it to be a distraction so I took pictures of the "after" or activity. I tend to grab the camera for activities we do upstairs. Here are a few of the activities we did last week:

From left:
Letter A collage: I cut out pictures from magazines that start with letter A and gathered up a few stickers that had A items on them and she made a collage. We used water down glue and a q-tip for this and it works really well! Much better for her than a gluestick.

Letter A alligator: I've seen this several different places. I used watered down glue for this too and she really enjoyed putting all his teeth on. He only had 1 eye at first, but she was adamant about adding a 2nd!

Alligator with eyes: This coloring sheet is from a book Gammie bought Sweet P for Christmas. There are several different types of animals (we did Alligator and Antelope) in the book and eye stickers to place on the animals eyes. She loves picking out the eyes and if sunglasses are an option, she usually goes for them!

From Left:
A is for apple printables from 1+1+1=1: With these, I tell her to dot capital A and she does all of them, then lowercase a and she does those. She used pink for capital A and purple for lowercase a. On the other A printable from 1+1+1 I tell her to dot each item one at a time. There's not a close up of the Aa items.

DoaDot A page from COAH: I laminated this page and planned to use pompoms, but she isn't very fond of doing it with pompoms so when I saw someone use stickers on a doadot page I thought it was genius! We have plenty of smiley face circular stickers from Auntie RoRo. She LOVED doing this and did a great job putting them in the circles!

The antelope is the same as the alligator in the top pic.

Other activities:

Scrabble Apple Tiles: I wrote out A words on a dry erase board and she matched the tiles to the appropriate letter.

Felt Apple Tree Game: See the blog post for more details.

Shaving Cream Sensory: She LOVED this and I can't wait to do it with her again. She sat at the kitchen table and I squirted shaving cream in a pile. She went to town playing with it and drawing in it, then we added cars and other tools.

Paper Car Mat: See the blog post for more details.

Flat Marble Sorting: She sorted flat marbles from a small plate into a ice cube tray with a scoop. She got tired of the scoop pretty quickly and just used her hands.

A is for Apple Magnet page: This is also from COAH. We used red pompoms instead of magnets. She doesn't love this activity, but we'll see how she does with other letters (we don't have one for B).

Apple sequencing: From COAH's prek curriculum CD. Sweet P does great with biggest to smallest, but has trouble with smallest to biggest.

Letter A puzzle: From COAH's prek curriculum CD. Sweet P loves puzzles and this was no exception!

Animal Sorting: This summer I found several preschool laminated activities at a garage sale and this is one of them. It's a classification game/activity that involves placing the animals in categories of land, water or air. The Farmer was with us when we did this and I can't believe how many of them she knew. A few of the animals were unfamiliar (hedgehog) so we learned some new animals, too!

Apple Stamping: I cut an apple in half and gave her some paint, the apple and paintbrush. She had a fun time painting, stamping and drawing apples when we did this.