Tot School- Letter A

This week we learned the letter A. Natalie pretty much already knew A just because it's the first letter. I felt that it was great for her to hear words starting with A over and over and learn the sound that A makes.

We started out Monday morning with Tot Trays because we were all still sleepy so I didn't want to start with too much. This is how I have our trays set up for now because this is what works best. I leave the trays out all the time but she really only plays with them when I suggest her to. I am trying to leave the same activity all week with only making a few changes here or there. I don't want her to get bored but yet I don't want to use all my ideas in one week. 

 A favorite activity is sorting. With this one I just have different color beads and she sorts them into different sections on the platter. I also have her go back and count how many she has of each color or have her count them as she sorts. There are a ton of beads for this one so she usually works on it at little at a time. Whatever works!

 We made the A is for Alligator. I really love this craft. It's so cute and creative. I'm planning on making and ABC book as we go and keeping 2 crafts from each week so that we can go back and look through them and she can have her own little book. The alligator craft came from No Time For Flash Cards

 We stamped with the letter A just to help her with recognition, I plan to do this each week with the letters since she loves stamping. I think she just loves the freedom to be able to do what she wants with the stamp and it doesn't have to look like anything when she's finished.

This is supposed to be a magnet sheet but since I don't have the magnets yet I let her paint it. She had such a good time and I thought it was cute how she did each section a different color.

We did apple prints as well because I remember doing them as a kid and I loved it. Nat wasn't that into the actual apple printing. I figured it would be great for her. She had a hard time dipping the apple in the paint so I ended up getting a foam brush for her to paint the apple then use it to stamp the paper. That was a little easier for her and she liked it then. I found this really neat idea at No Time For Flash Cards to make a wreath with the prints as a fall decoration. Since fall is fast approaching I loved this idea. Natalie had such a great time gluing the apples onto the plate that she was sad when she ran out of apples. We even made an extra for grandma because we know grandma's love these kinds of "gifts".

We also did lots of do a dots with different shapes and the letter A. She had a great time with her letter A traceables though she would get bored of it pretty quickly, instead of having her try to do even a whole row I would ask her to do 2 letters in between activities and that worked out really well.

We had such a great week I'm so excited to start on the letter B tomorrow, partially since our last name starts with a B! Have a great week everyone!