A is for Apple!

We will be going through the alphabet doing theme work each week to go along with that letter. Both of the girls have great letter recognition but I like having a letter theme as a way to tie all the weeks’ work together.

This week I’ll be linking up to 1+1+1=1 and Homeschool Creations.

This week we were all about apples. I love fall! It’s my favorite season. Busting out all the apple crafts and printables got me so excited for the cooler weather and smells and sights of fall!

We are doing school 3 days a week for 1 1/2 hours each day. (However…so far, the girls have been so excited about school that we have spent 2 to 2 1/2 hours each day doing it before I finally have to stop and make lunch!) But our goal will remain at least 3 days at 1 1/2 hours each, with longer if they desire.

We started each day with a time of music with instruments, singing along to songs and dancing. The girls loooved this. I checked out a bunch of CDs from the library with silly songs, nursery rhymes, bible songs and anything with a catchy tune….even a kid’s Reggae CD!

We started our Raising Rock Stars Preschool with RJ and it was also really great review for MK. I’ also printed off several activities from Raising Rock Stars Kindergarten for MK To go through. They both were really excited to see the reappearance of the RRSP board, which they refer to as their school board.  I LOVED hearing RJ commit her first verse to memory! This came so easy to MK as she has great memorization skills. RJ took great pride and joy in memorizing…I could tell by her face she really felt like a big girl! I love them having God’s word implanted in their heart. All throughout the week we would talk about the verse when someone got a little agitated. (example: screaming……..RJ…..that is not the way Jesus wants us to respond to each other. Can you remember what Proverbs 15:1 says? RJ-“A soft answer turns away wrath.”…followed by much smiles and another attempt at answering more softly.)

While I am not the biggest fan of the letter baskets…(time to put them together and then sort it all out when week is over) the girls have so much fun exploring, playing, practicing letter sounds and they don’t even realize they are working on literacy. They loved playing with all the red pom pom “apples” and feeding them to all the Alligators, and Abbys.

I didn’t get any pictures of this, but we started the All About Reading Pre-K pack this week with both the girls. They both LOOOOOVED Ziggy the Zebra and were delighted to do anything he asked! We did 3 different lessons all about rhyming and by the end of the week both girls were walking around the house rhyming throughout the day. ( cake, bake, make, take, pake, sake, lake, jake…and so on.)

I printed off the entire alphabet of these magnetic letter pattern sheets from Confessions of a Homeschooler. This is one of those activities I was really excited about that the girls don’t seem too interested in. But I will continue to try them out each week.

We used many apple themed printables from 1+1+1=1.

And some from Homeschool Creations.

I cannot remember where this printed tree and apples came from as I printed it off over a year ago and can’t find it. But it is great practice for matching the lowercase to the capital of each letter.

RJ enjoyed working on the shape puzzle from 1+1+1=1 Tot pack.

I pulled many apple themed worksheets out of our abundance of workbooks that we already had on hand. MK seems to really like doing these kind of sheets. And I love that I don’t have to print anything off.

We worked on handwriting. With RJ, I’m just working on pencil grasp and tracing basic lines. She always wants to do more to keep up with MK, but just isn’t ready yet. We will be working on lots of other creative ways to build handwriting in the weeks to come as I don’t want to push the pencil before she is ready.

Coloring is a biggie that I’m using to prepare her. She loves to color right now so I’m really trying to build on that enthusiasm with activities that encourage her to stay within parameters with her crayon. We are also working on basic drawings….totally self guided…she is just really into “drawing” pictures lately and I’m not ever going to deter her from pencil (or crayon) and paper.

We read a ton of books but here is a glimpse of our apple books. They both loved Curious George Apple Harvest and I had every intention of taking them to pick apples…but they time came and went and I guess we will just pick pumpkins next month instead!

We of course had to bust out some application to go along with Ten Apples Up on Top! We used these adorable apple beanbags that grandma made for MK”s birthday party last year.

We of course had to balance them on our heads!

I really enjoyed the bright fun apple printables from this pack. We worked on patterns and counting.

I have not busted out the dot markers with them in a couple of months and they were asking for them one day so I ran down and printed off a couple worksheets from this pack to use with their dot markers and they plowed right through them.

I had so many apple crafts in mind but just had to narrow it down to 2 because we had so much else to do this week! I love the lower case alphabet printables from COHS and so we will use these each week for a craft. The girls painted them to look like apples.

We then made paper plate finger paint, glittery apples. They loved getting messy and sparkly of course!

For our sensory play this week I made apple spice playdoh. I put in 3 packets of apple cider tea bags to make the smell. They also made little bumpies in the playdoh that I thought made the texture more interesting and the smell was fantastic!

We did lots of poking, rolling and counting with the playdoh.

I made them big and little A’s and then gave them small Animals to press into them. This is always a favorite for RJ….she loves a letter and random stuff to push in.

We had a fantastic first week of school! MK was overwhelmed with enthusiasm and excitement every day and was always disappointed when I had to quit so I could go make lunch. (My plan is 9:30 to 11,  3 days a week, but we went until noon all 3 days this week just because they were having so much fun!) I feel so blessed to be home with them and so blessed to have the space to dedicate specifically to school now. Many moments this week reminded me of how blessed I am to have the chance to teach them from home….like teaching RJ how to use scissors and watching her mouth open with the scissors each time, or watching the excitement on MK’s face as we went through are AAR activities. She would get so excited when she figured out something new….she loves that she is learning how to read, and it also helps that she is in love with the Zebra Puppet (Ziggy).

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