Photo Challenge - Red

This is my little man being silly in Vermont this summer. I'm entering it in Paper Mama's Red Photo Challenge.

A is for Alligator ...again

We did this theme last year. I came up with some new ideas for this year and we had a lot of fun. Last year we did the typical capital "A" alligator that is seen on a million blogs. This year I did it with a little twist. We made him without teeth and made it into a game. We rolled a dice and then put on that number of teeth. We used the play dough I made the other day for the apple theme. It is slightly brown, so I told Alex that the alligator hadn't been brushing his teeth. It was great counting practice.

Alex wanted to do more with the play dough so I gave him the whole chunk and a plastic alligator that Alex already had. He made alligator foot prints, the alligator ate the play dough, and he made prints in the dough with the texture of the alligators scales.

We also made a alligator out of hand prints. It was kind of an abstract alligator, but Alex and myself really love hand print art.

We did some printable worksheets from Lightning Bug Literacy

Alligator 1-10 puzzle

Letter A tracing page

I pulled out our Do A Dot paints. Alex never really showed much interest in them, but today he loved them. He did a alligator page from Making Learning Fun and he did the ant magnet page from the previous post and a letter "A" page from Confessions of A Homeschooler.

We practiced making the letter "A" with a paint bag. Green finger paint in a ziploc bag.

We sang the song:
Five little monkeys swinging in the tree
teasing Mr. Alligator can’t catch me….can’t catch me
along came Mr. Alligator quiet as can be
and snapped that monkey out that tree

Continue counting down the monkeys till there are none left.

Alex acting out the snapping Mr. Alligator with a little alligator snapper I made for him. I got the idea from here. I just used some cardboard, bottle caps, green and red paint, small pompoms and wiggly eyes (thanks to craftprojectideas.com).

For a snack I made him alligators sitting on logs. Not exactly healthy, but fun. The alligators were green Fruit Rollups cut out with a cookie cutter and the logs was graham crackers.

We watched a old classic Sesame Street clip Alligator King I love classic Sesame Street. I'm not a fan of present day Sesame Street though. I think it lost its creativeness and is trying to be too politically correct.

We read The Lady With the Alligator Purse by Nadine Bernard Westcott. It doesn't really have much to do with alligators, but it is a fun book.

and we looked at Alligators: Backyard Animals by Heather C. Hudak. It is a little advanced for him, but it was good to see real photos of alligators.

A is for Airplane

Today's theme was airplanes. Airplanes are one of Alex's favorite things, so he happy to participate. We did a couple of worksheets from kidzpark.com, a airplane tracing worksheet

and a matching game with different styles of airplanes. Alex really like this and wanted to repeat it multiple times.

He also practiced writing the letter "A" on a little dry erase board. He drew a family portrait too.

After he traced his airplane worksheet I cut out the airplane. I mounted it to a piece of cardboard to make it sturdier and then we cut out people (a robot and monkey too) from a magazine that he wanted to ride on the airplane. Alex like to try to cut, but the magazine paper was too thin and slippery that it wasn't working for him. I had to do it. He glued all the pictures onto the airplane.

It was such a gorgeous day we moved the rest of our activities outside. I had seen the idea for a balloon rocket on A Little Learning For Two's blog, I decided that we would try it with our airplane instead. It was a success and Alex loved it.

A Little Learning For Two's blog explains it very well. The idea was to a tie at string between to objects. Attach the airplane to a drinking straw, then thread the string through the straw. Blow up a balloon, don't tie it. Tape the balloon to the airplane and straw, let go and your airplane takes off down the string. Alex thought the sound the balloon made was so funny.

The other activity we did today was paint an airplane. I purchased a white styrofoam airplane from the Dollar Tree, I thought it would be fun to let Alex paint it. Alex is pretty good at naming his colors but it was a good review.

When the paint was dry he had a blast flying it.

After a while he decided he was going to be an airplane too.

For a snack I made him a banana airplane with apple slice wings, cheerio and graham cracker windows and it was flying through a marshmallow cloud.

The books we read today where Going On A Plane by Anne Civardi
 

Moon Plane by Peter McCarty

Later in the evening Alex had fun doing the letter "A" alphabet game on Starfall.com

A is for Ant

"A" is the letter of the week and ants were today's theme. We also had speech therapy and Gymboree Music and Play so we didn't fit too much school work in.

So, the other day we received a package in the mail. Fedex pulled up and I grumbled at my husband "Now what did you order?" Haha...but it was a pleasent surprise a "Rainy Day Survival Kit" from Craftprojectideas.com I was contacted by them recently asking if I would be interested in receiving samples of their products and would possibly participate in future online forums and blog hops. Of course I agreed, who wouldn't want some free craft supplies!

The box was filled with melty beads, finger paints, pipe cleaners, pompoms, magnets, popsicle sticks, and colored cords. Thanks craftprojectideas.com,  we have been looking forward to using them.

I printed out an ant magnet worksheet from 2teachingmommies and the magnets in this kit were perfect size to use with it. I think in the future I will paint them so they are different colors.

I taped the sheet to our fridge and Alex worked on applying the magnets.

I  found a cute ant craft idea on  Classified: Mom and we made our own version. It is made with a toilet paper roll cut into 3 pieces, some paint, pipe cleaners and googly eyes. We used the brown finger paint from our new kit to paint the ants body.

We also made "A" shaped anthill with fingerprint ants. We used the brown finger paint again for this. Alex said they looked like spiders when we were finished and I agree they kind of do. Oops. 

We talked about what the ants might like to eat. We made them a little picnic plate with a variety of foods, sugar, maple syrup, ketchup, peanut butter, Cheerios, and a tomato.We took it outside and placed in where we knew some ants lived. Soon we saw a little ant was seen eating the maple syrup.

For Alex's snack I made him an "anthill" It was a slice of apple, spread with peanut butter, crumbled graham crackers as "dirt" and some raisin "ants." It was a hit except for the raisin, he's now decided he doesn't like raisins?

For books we read One Hundred Hungry Ants by Elinor J. Pinczes, it is about ants the are trying to make it to a picnic before all the food is gone.

And we read The Ants Go Marching by Ann Owen and Sandra D'Antonio. It is a cutely illustrated book of the traditional song.

School Has Started

I made the decision to keep Alex home another year and do some home school preschool. He still has the opportunity to go to a preschool next year, which he probably will if not for any other reason then to get social interaction and not be shell shocked when it is time for him to enter kindergarten. For the last couple of months I have been researching a planning what I want to do with him. I decided a curriculum based on the alphabet. One letter every week. We will do a little pre-writing, practice counting, do some simple science experiments, read lots of books, review shapes and colors, do arts and crafts, do some fine and gross motor skill activities, explore with sensory play and most of all have fun. They are only young once!

So today was our first day. Alex had fun. "A" is the letter of the week, and today's theme was apples. We started the day with our morning board. I made this for him to use as a visual aid to talk about his name, age, date, weather, seasons, letter of the week, shapes and colors. The pieces all have Velcro so they can be moved and changed around.

He did some pre-writing worksheets from Confessions of a Homeschooler.

We practiced counting with a little game. Alex rolled a big dice and put the number rolled of apples (red pompoms) on the tree.

We made an apple sun catcher. We melted apple colored crayon shavings between wax paper using a iron. I obviously did this part. He then glued the wax paper in the center of a apple shape I cut out of construction paper and it made a beautiful sun catcher.

I made him some play dough using the recipe from Counting Coconuts. I've used this recipe several times and it always comes out great. This time I didn't add any color to it, I just added some cinnamon and it made it a light tan color and it smelled great. We pretended to make apple pie.

He did a directional art gluing activity and made a lower case "a" apple. The idea is from Totally Tots.

In the theme of the day I made him some apple smiles for a snack. They are made with two slices of red apple with the skin on, spread them with peanut butter and some mini marshmallow "teeth" in between. He loved it. I got the idea from Pinterest the original post was from Disneyfamily.com

Lastly, we read a couple of great books about apples. We read Apples, Apples, Apples by Nancy Elizabeth Wallace. 

And The Seasons of Arnold's Apple Tree  by Gail Gibbons.