LotW: F & H

We put the letters "F" and "H" together in order to stay on schedule. (Which worked, but now we're back off schedule. Oh well.) We did not do a whole lot for letter "H" but "F" turned out to be a lot of fun.

Our biggest project for "H" was decorating a heart ornament. We did a lot of talking about hearts and houses. He did a great job tracing his "H" page. It's the first time he's really done the letter page on his own so that was nice. Here are a couple pictures of Zander decorating his heart. He had the most fun because his daddy got to help him do this one.


Moving on to "F." A few weeks ago I found some little football-shaped foil cake pans. They were on sale after the Super Bowl so I got a great deal on them. (Side note: I wish I had thought to put "F" week for the week leading up to the Super Bowl. I made a note to myself to remember that for next year!) One box of cake mix filled up four of the cake pans.

Here is Zander getting ready to help out with the mixer. This is the first time that he's been willing to hold the mixer while it was on and it was hysterical! I took a video of him doing the mixing. Throughout the whole thing you hear the mixer, Zander giggling, and me saying "Leave it in the bowl...Leave it in the bowl...Leave it in the bowl." I had mental images of a chocolate-splattered kitchen; look at those mischievous eyes and tell me you wouldn't have been concerned too!

Zander filled the cake pans up using a measuring cup. He did a really great job (which translates into "minimal mess") and managed to put off licking the measuring cup until he was all the way done. (Side note: Yes, I realize that there are raw eggs in that. We live dangerously here in the CalmCrazy house.)

We put some chocolate icing on top (because there can never be enough chocolate, you know) and then let him put the "lacings" on top with some white icing. (We just used a plastic sandwich bag with a corner cut off since I don't have any of them there fancy cake decorating tools.) Can you guess which one I did? And yes, he got to eat the icing left in the baggie. We're also complete nutcases around here.


I label the week a success. We learned a couple new letters and ate some cake. Life is good.

LotW: E & G

At the end of my last college term we got a little behind. In order to catch up I paired a letter that Zander was pretty familiar with ("E") with a letter that he has a little more trouble with ("G"). As you will see, we concentrated a little more on the G.

Jason made Zander a breakfast featuring his two letters of the week: Egg sandwich and Grapes! He wasn't too sure about the egg sandwich.


We painted a picture of the "Earth" for letter E. The fact that this is the planet where we currently live was a little over Zander's head. When he saw the planet view of Earth he immediately launched into a story about how we were going to get there on a space ship. At first I tried to explain but in the end I just went with it. I think we can approach Astronomy a little later on.


One day we made a Ghost snack using whipped cream and cookie decorations. This should have been a huge hit...but Zander apparently doesn't like whipped cream. Oops. That's okay. He still had fun playing in it.


Here is our big project for the week. We made a "Green Gator" out of an empty egg carton, green paint, some construction paper, and a few split peas. This was a HUGE hit with Zander. Family and friends might remember his "snap" cake from last year; he's a huge alligator/crocodile fan.

I like projects that help work on fine motor skills. Zander did a great job setting the peas into the glue dots I made for him.


Here is the finished project. I think it is so cute! Zander really loved it and it didn't take very long to finish. Definitely a great project for "G" (or "A" or "C")!

Our next "Letter of the Week" installment will be on the letters F and H.

Letter of the Week: C

We did a couple of fun activities for "C" Week. We learned about circles, cars (a big hit with Zander), caterpillars, clouds, and colors.

Making the caterpillars was a great activity which allowed us to combine several "lessons" into one. (Circles, colors, caterpillars.) I cut the circles out the night before the activity. If you are more ambitious than I am you could let your child trace and cut them out. (Maybe it's not a question of ambition as much as it is bravery. Ahem.) Zander had a lot of fun gluing the circles together to make his caterpillar. He got to pick out the antenna color and the eyes. It came out pretty cute, if I do say so myself. I love the eyes he picked out!


Doesn't he look proud?


Our second big activity for the week involved making clouds. This was a very simple project which only required three supplies: blue construction paper, glue, and cotton balls. I didn't take any pictures of the actual activity, but this was our "end of the week" pic. You can see that we also learned hair cut this week if you compare it to the pic above.

We talked about the letter "C" every time we played with cars, while we watched the movie Cars, and when we had cookies. Some other ideas that can be incorporated into "C" week: cat, carrot, Cinderella, cactus, candycan, chalk, cake, and many more!

Letter of the Week: Intro

Something that we have never done in this house is a lot of "structured" learning. It has never been that we didn't believe in it; it just wasn't something that worked for us. Sam was in a structured environment (via his daycare) from 6 weeks until the end of his Kindergarten year. When we got him home at night we did a lot of playing and singing and dancing...but nothing like sitting around learning his letters or numbers. He did all that at daycare and had no interest in it once he was home. To be honest, it wasn't something I really spent a lot of time thinking about at the time.

Jake, who left the daycare environment at the age of two, rebuffed every attempt I made at organized learning. He simply had no desire to sit and color or do a craft or count manipulatives. I did the best I could to incorporate those skills into our everyday play, but he didn't enter any kind of real lesson-planned learning environment until he went to pre-school just after he turned 3. I did manage to beat myself up a little over that one. When we decided that I was going to stay home with the kids, I had these pictures in my head of what things were going to be like and I nearly couldn't handle the fact that things just didn't work out the way I thought they would.

Zander is (always has been, and probably will always be!) a completely different ball of wax. This boy is a sucker for a craft project. He loves and adores to learn his letters. He wants you to sit with him and read book after book while he points out all the letters he knows. He asks us ten times a day to count with him as he holds his hand out and raises his fingers one by one. He will tell us the color of anything and everything that he sees. I don't think any of this takes him outside the realm of normal, but it is new to us. We find it amazing.

As a parent, you try to not compare your children but sometimes it just can't be helped. I would have thought Jake to be the more likely candidate for wanting to sit and do crafts and structured learning. He has always been much more quite and still than Zander. Zander is, well, a nut. An adorably sweet nut, but a nut all the same! The boy is intense 24/7. The fact that he wants to sit down and do these things just floors me.

But he does. And so we do. Because he seemed so interested in letters, I decided to incorporate a little "structured pre-school learning" into our daily activities. The thing is, I'm not so great with schedules. So I just decided to do one letter a week for the whole year. Think about it -- 26 letters; 52 weeks. It's perfect! We get to go through the alphabet once just for the purposes of identifying them all and then the second go-round we can start to really focus on their sounds and stuff.

We're in week 8 now and have done the letters: A, B, C, E, F, G, H, and V. (We did "V" during the week leading up to Valentine's Day and we're saving "D" for when the local Dinosaur Park opens back up next month.) He's got them all down except "G"; that one he gets about 80% of the time.

I didn't do a great job of documenting "A" or "B," but I thought I would start detailing some of our activities here on the blog starting with the letter "C". Some of the ideas I have found have been really cute and I would love to share them with others. If you know of another project that would be great for a letter as we're going along, please let us know in the comments! I'll be moving back around to that letter again later in the year and I would love to hear some fresh ideas.

Do you do structured learning in your home? What method (or methods) have worked for you?