Long A Theme Week

It has been a super fun week here at my house! We have had our first ever Theme Week - inspired by Katherine over at http://katherinemariephotography.com/blog/ . I've taken pictures to document our fun but mine don't begin to compare to hers. Maybe someday but for now you'll have to live with snapshots.

I'm going to attempt to recall everything we did this week and link you to the sources. Most of them were free if you decide you want to use any of them for your own theme week or supplemental schooling or fun time - whatever you decide to call it.

While my daughter was in school (second grade) the boys (Kindergarten and age 4) and I did most of this. We did include Ashlee in the theme week too but I'll get to that later. First we made this Turkey. You'll notice his head is made with an acorn cut out. I found him here -
http://www.first-school.ws/activities/crafts/animals/birds/turkey_oak.htm
He seemed fitting for the week before Thanksgiving. Plus it gave us a chance to go for a walk, practice our cutting and our gluing. Good stuff.

While your at that site, check out the long A mini books you can print off there. http://www.first-school.ws/theme/alphabetp2.htm#a2

My boys thought it was super fun to make them! Actually, I was surprised by how much they enjoyed that project. Seemed so simple to me but they pulled them off the board a couple times this past week to go over them again and recall the words and show off their work. They were very proud of these! I'll be doing those again.

While Case was at Kindergarten one day, Mason and I made a capital and lowercase A with crayon, then glue and then rice. Why rice? Because it's what I had in my pantry! No more rhyme or reason than that.

Gave his little hands a chance to practice more skills.

We also discovered the Starfall website this week. Wow. My kids think this site is super fun! I took them there to see the little video about the letter A and they have gone to that site repeatedly this week for other letter videos, matching games and other fun stuff. All of it is free and it's all geared to learning to read phonics style. Click on the letter A at the following link and see the cute little video yourself. At the end, your child gets to sort the letters from the tree into the basket for uppercase or lowercase.

http://www.starfall.com/n/level-k/index/load.htm?f

While I was at that Starfall site, I went to the download center to see what worksheets they had for the letter A. When you click the link, you'll see 4 pages in pdf come up associated with the letter. We used the second worksheet and let my 4 year old color the letters (pictured above) and glue on a bunch of long A themed die cuts I have left over from my scrapbooking stash. (See the picture below for the finished version.) You can't see it in the picture but he also practiced writing his upper case A along the bottom of the page.

http://www.starfall.com/n/N-info/abcprint.htm?n=abc

One of our favorite activities was Ankle Art. I had some tattoos and we applied them to our ankles for a little more fun.

In addition to all the things pictured, we colored in Angels (something I had on hand from another source), we colored Anchors (http://www.first-school.ws/t/cp_transportation/anchor.htm) and we colored another Acorn. (http://www.first-school.ws/t/cp_seasonal/f_acorn_mouse.htm)

I have the first three books in the Core Knowledge Series (What Your Kindergartner Should Know, First Grader and Second Grader - available at Amazon.com http://www.amazon.com/What-Your-Kindergartner-Needs-Know/dp/0385318413/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1258856958&sr=8-1) and I included some things from those books for my Kindergartner and my Second Grader. On the Acorn coloring page above, I explained the saying, "Great oaks from little acorns grow." And we discussed a little about Abraham Lincoln. We discussed Aesop's Fables and I read them three of them while my daughter read one aloud. We talked about Asia being one of the 7 continents and discussed some aspects of China - creatures that live there, the great wall and looked at a map.

The boys made Jake's Tale book from Starfall (http://www.starfall.com/n/N-info/onlinebooks.htm?n=downloadcenter) and worked on two worksheets from the Long A pdf under Level 1 Reading and Writing Journal. We only did page 31 and 32. (http://www.starfall.com/n/N-info/level-1.htm?n=downloadcenter)

Part of the curriculum I bought from Little Hands to Heaven included a book called My ABC Bible Verses. (Available at Amazon - http://www.amazon.com/My-ABC-Bible-Verses-Hiding/dp/1581340052/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1258855690&sr=8-1) I read them the two pages on the letter A and we made Proverbs 15:1 our verse for the week. We repeated it daily and my 8 year old memorized it. The 6 year old has it pretty much memorized too.

Ashlee and I spent some time together one evening playing Watson's Word Wall with letter A words. I found this game at pbskids.org. (http://www.pbs.org/parents/lions/educators/activities_printable.html)

In addition to all that, we spent time working on homework assignments from school including counting by 10s to 100, roman numerals and talked about palindromes. Mason worked on writing his first name on each item he did while Case worked on his first, middle and last name with capitalization and lower case letters. We did art, we built with Legos and had a terrific time with each other!

The kids enjoyed the week so much that when I went into our little room to take a picture of the filled up board for this blog post, I found my kids in there working in workbooks that they had each dug out! I promise, I had nothing to do with that!

I know this all sounds very heavy on worksheets and perhaps a bit like I worked my children over this week - but that is really not the case. It was all fun! It also sounds like it was really, really time consuming but it wasn't like that either.

We are all looking forward to more theme weeks in our future. Won't you let me know if you try a theme week at your house?

Cheers!