Easy as ABC

Hey everybody!  We've been busy around these parts lately being crafty!  In order to preserve my personal sanity, I was looking for something that might lend a bit of structure to our otherwise unstructured days, and since little bit will not be heading off to school this year (although we are considering a part time daycare situation to give her some social outlet-thoughts and advice welcome), we need something new at home.  I've started choosing a letter (and sometimes a number and color if I am really on the ball) for each week.  It's not something that I have to plan for.  It's something I can do on the fly, and then just enjoy coming up with/finding stuff online to do that relates somehow to that letter.  We've started out the last two weeks by sitting down and just sketching out things that start with our letter of the week, then Maya colors them and circles all of the letters she can find that are that week's letters (sorry, i didn't take a pic of this part).  She also traces the capital and lowercase versions of the letter.  Then I just come up with some activities that go with the letter that we can do that week.  I find that just this little bit of structure challenges my brain and I am MUCH more creative than I would have been with no structure!  I've also used video segments from Sesame Street (on YouTube) (you can find both number and letter specific videos that are very short and are often from the episodes we watched as kids!).  Here are some of the things we've done as a result of our Letter of the week activity.  We're also trying to learn the phoenetic sound with each letter, but we're not pushing it--just trying to keep things FUN because I think that's the best way for her to learn, and before long, she will have to be in a much too serious learning environment anyway :( . . .

The letter C

Crazy colorful cookies:  a batch of sugar cookies divided into four balls, each colored a different color with food coloring, rolled into snakes (she loved that part), then rolled together (think of making clay beads--it's just like that!) and pressed/twisted/braided together--whatever!  Then you just cut them off and let little bit put them on the pan (and squash several of them).

Who wouldn't want this little face helping them in the kitchen?!  Okay, I confess, sometimes I don't want quite so much help, but I'm trying to learn to enjoy having a shadow because (and yes I am SOOOO tired of hearing it), it will be over so soon and then I will miss it. . . I know.  I know. 

Then we made some Colorful Cards:

I saw an activity on Pinterest using chalk pastels, which I just happened to have (thank you Katie F!).  You shave off bits of the pastels into a shallow amount of water, then just lay your paper right on top of the water, and it makes all kinds of cool designs.  Between each paper we would just pick a few more colors to add to the mix.

We mounted our papers on some folded paper to make cards.  SO easy and she loved dipping the paper into the water and seeing what colors we created.  My only advice would be shave LOTS of the pastel into the water for a more dramatic result, we went easy and the resulting shades were pretty light. 

Now Blogger won't let me post any more pictures so we'll talk about the letter W next time!