Homeschooling

So here we are, at the start of another school year and this year Joshua gets to participate in on all the school fun!! He was SO excited to be starting 'preschool at home' this morning that he woke me up 4 times last night asking if it was morning and if he could do school. It was so sweet, cute and annoying as all get out-lol. I know he's excited but I wanted to sleep! Though I have to say, I hope this excitements continues for the next 30 weeks :)

Joshua is starting preschool this year and my main focus is going to be the alphabet. Joshua already knows them all, both capital and lowercase, by sight but I want to help him learn and understand each sound they make and how to write them. Most of my activities come from Confessions of a Homeschooler and 1+1+1=1, both are homeschooling mama's who I have been following for some time now. I love them both though most of my stuff came from Confessions of a Homeschooler.

So today we started our Letter Of the Week program. If you remember, I started this a few months ago before Joshua got really sick. We decided to take a break over the summer, get the kids healthy and figure things out, and try it again. So here we are.

This week's letter is letter Aa and here is what we did today:

*We introduced letter Aa and talked about how a makes the sound 'a' and 'ah'. Joshua thought it was really funny to hear our Leap Frog word builder explain the 'ah' sound-it said that A says 'ah' when it gets scared by a monster "ahhhh" and Joshua loves monsters!! Then we worked on writing the letter A.

Joshua did an AMAZING job writing his capital A,

but when asked to attempt to write his lowercase a (we talked about how it is a circle with a tail) he got very frustrated,

and Moo decided to copy his attitude as well.

But soon was able to color happily on her lined paper :)

*Next we worked on tracing capital and lowercase letter A's with colored cubes that we use for counting and sorting. Joshua really got into this one and worked very hard at making sure they were perfect!!

*After our cubes were all cleaned up we pulled out some crayons and markers and colored a sheet with apples on it and a reminder that Aa is for Apples.

*After our sheet was colored we moved onto our floor numbers and all the kids REALLY got into this activity!! They marched across the numbers, they skipped across the numbers, they walked, ran, and tip toed across the numbers. They could have spent HOURS with these number cards I am sure. They loved it!!

Then we took a break for snack and ate yogurt and apples :)

*After snack there was only one more activity for the day and it was to color the cover sheet for Joshua's ABC book. I will be creating a binder with copies of all his work this year so we can look back and see how he has progressed with writing and such and see what a difference can be made in 30 weeks :)

All in all our 'school day' was about 1.5hrs, and I think it was a great amount of time. Joshua was disappointed when the 'day' was done, but he had a great rest of his morning, complete with some Signing Time,

lunch and then down for a nap :)