Apples and the Letter A
September 8, 2020
Hello! I pray that today's smokey air isn't too bothersome for you. Hopefully the rest of this sunny and hot week will be better for playing outside.
As I promised in my last email, here are some activities you can do with your child this week. This week's theme is apples and the letter A!
Zoo Phonic handout for the letter Aa:
Zoo Phonics is the curriculum we use for teaching the alphabet and each letter's sounds (phonics), an important pre-reading skill. In this program, each letter has an animal friend with movements to help us remember the sounds it makes. Our first animal friend is Allie Alligator. After watching the video below to meet Allie and learn more about alligators, then practicing the sounds/movements with your child, you may want to print and use the Zoo Phonics handout to help your child learn to write the letter A. You may notice that the video focuses mainly on lowercase A. We like to teach both upper and lowercase letters, because it's important that children eventually learn how to write both, as opposed to just the uppercase letters. There are many different items around your home that begin with the short A sound; how many can your child find?
Apple Activities:
Apples are in season right now. Maybe you even have an apple tree at or near your home you can explore and do some science with. The graphic below has some ideas for activities to help reinforce pre-math skills like sorting, color recognition, and fine motor skills (which are important to develop before learning the proper way to hold a pencil). It also has some suggestions for apple science, and a recipe for making applesauce with your child. When we make applesauce during preschool, we like to talk with the kids about the various parts of an apple, the various colors apples come in, and how our five senses perceive apples (how they taste, smell, feel, etc.). Disclaimer: the graphic below was created in PowerPoint and the video link didn't come through quite right, so I included a separate link below to watch the video through YouTube. It is a fun rhyming song that helps teach number awareness and subtraction. You may want to put up one hand with your five fingers up while singing, and put down one finger each time an apple is eaten.
Next week's theme will be shapes, and you have probably already guessed that the letter is Bb. Stay tuned for a link to our Godly Play Chapel for next Sunday (September 20), where we will hear me tell the story "The Holy Family."
