Brought to You By the Letter...

Eli and I have continued to utilize the library this summer. We seem to go all the time...sometimes 2-3 days in one week. We go to return and choose new books(for both of us!), for story time, and for puppet programs.

And now that school is out, we both have a bit more time on our hands to fill each day. I try to fill our quiet mornings with some fun (academic) activities. We have focused our efforts on pre-reading skills (letters, sounds, sounding out multiple sounds, etc) and week long book units. You may remember some of book units I tried last summer, well we are at it again. For our first book this summer, we picked If You Give a Moose a Muffin by Laura Joffe Numeroff.

Now, Eli and I are not new to Ms. Numeroff's cyclical stories, but we love them, and I found a lot of activities we could do with it....which included making muffins. I was hoping to use our freshly picked blueberries, but Eli got very excited about chocolate chip muffins instead. I never know which activity on which day of the week will register and hit home the most with the boy. It was the letter M that excited Eli the most. He looked and listened all week for words that started with "mmmmmm."

Of course, that immediately got me interested in trying another one of Laura Numeroff's books to tackle another letter and sound. We just finished 5 days of:

Can you guess which letter we worked on this week?

P!

We read the book each day and did some comprehension and retelling activities. I remembered that I had the printouts ready to make the felt board story pieces for this book.

Eli had fun playing with the pieces and making up his own stories, but he would also use the pieces to tell the story as I read from the book. I stumbled upon a great website with ready-made activities and online games created by the publisher. And of course, we practiced writing the letter P, recognizing words that start with "p", and we wrapped up the week with a P Scavenger Hunt.

He was super cute walking around with his Polka-dot Pouch saying the "p" sound over and over and then the names of the things he saw to figure out if he should Put it in his Pouch. These was what he ended up with:

Not too shabby. At first, he was afraid if he put them in, they would have to stay there. It took a little convincing to get him to select his first item.

We wrapped up our unit today Playing at the Park,

getting VERY hot and sweaty,

so that we could come home and have our homemade...

POPSICLES!

You were thinking, Pancakes, right? Well, I plan to make those tomorrow morning...I didn't have everything I needed to make them.

***UPDATED***

I gave a very cute piggy some pancakes this morning...and guess what!

He wanted some syrup to go with them.

It was a fun week with P. Not sure what book we'll do next. Hmmm....suggestions?