Letter Z is for Zoo

 We did the letter Z in one day.  I tried to keep the theme around zoos and zoo animals.

Tray 1: Beginning Sounds page with stamp pen

Tray 2: Letter z do-a-dot page with stamp pen

Tray 3: Letter z letter hunt with stamp pen

Tray 4: Letter z handwriting page

Tray 5: Animal sticker play

Tray 6: Cutting practice

Tray 7: Animal Mazes (taken from My Book of Easy Mazes)

The last two activities we did together.  First we played with our toy animals using our different play mats.  We like to sort the animals out depending on the environment they live in.

We also matched up mommies and babies with this cute felt play set. Look at those adorable baby penguins!

Letter Y Week (ish) :)

Hello again, friends.  It's been quite awhile since I wrote a post, mostly because we moved, the boys joined a Joy School group, and I got involved in other activities.  But I HATE leaving things unfinished!  I actually did "finish up" the letters y and z with the boys (probably about 6 months ago), but I never put it up on the blog.  Mostly because I just reused activities I had made for previous weeks and didn't spend a whole lot of time on it.  But they still enjoyed doing those extra school activities with me, and I decided to just share what we did anyways.

DAY 1

Instead of doing our full Calendar Time and Notebook time, Alex decided he wanted to put up the whole calendar by himself.  He worked hard, sifting through the number cards to put them all in the right order.  And he did great!

We introduced the letter with our usual letter sounds basket.  I only had a few items, including our foam letter y, sign language y card, Yoda toy, Yoshi toy, yo-yo card, and yarn card.

Then I introduced our activity trays for the day.

Tray 1: Beginning Sounds worksheet with stamp pens (Original and updated versions here)

Tray 2: Numbered counting pages with counting bears

Tray 3: Foam letter y with glass gems

Tray 4: Inchworm Counting file folder game (made using the Inchworm Counting activity here)

Tray 5: Letter y do-a-dot page with stamp pens

Tray 6: Jackson's Reading Lesson from Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons

Here the boys are hard at work:

We ran out of bears for this activity, so we finished it up with the glass gems.

I also had some "fast finishers" set up for Alex to do during my reading lesson with Jackson, as well as after all the activities were completed.  Those were putting together puzzles and painting.

DAY 2

 Tray 1: Coin pattern strips with loose change

Tray 2: Beginning sounds clip cards with wooden clothespins

Tray 3: Geoboard with rubber bands

Tray 4: Elephant graphing cards with Cheerios

Even with activities they have seen before, the boys still enjoy doing "school activities."

After the tray activities were cleaned up, we decided to play Memory with our Numbers Go Fish game.  This is always a favorite!

Jackson also got to listen and read along to his Usborne phonics reader book titled Ted and Friends.

We also have been working on storytelling.  When we went to my parents home last year we were able to bring back our set of felt stories, including this one of Goldilocks and the Three Bears.  The boys really enjoy retelling the story themselves!