Letter Recognition | letter Aa

We've started our at home lessons this week. Even though Ry will be going to preschool five hours a week, I still want to benefit from homeschooling. Preschool this year is more for play and socialization. He will obviously be learning from his teachers and peers, but the majority of his learning will be here at home. He has recently become very interested in letters and numbers. We have been watching Leap Frog: Letter Factory together and we are constantly singing the letter sounds song all the time. And I mean all the time, over and over and over until my head hurts. But it took him only three times to have it completely memorized and he can now spot each letter and will say the sound. We are working on actually saying the letter name now.

We are starting right from the beginning and the entire week was dedicated to the letter A. We working on tracing and writing the letter A (capitalized only for now), recognizing the letter A, and finding things that begin with the letter A. We focus mostly on apples, alligators, and airplanes. All of this letter A talk led us to the apple orchard to pick apples and of course meant that poor little man got roped into a quick photo session. More on that another day.

One of Ryder's favorite lessons this week was the letter A apple tree activity I made. He matched all five letter A apples in a matter of seconds but he would do it over and over again. He especially liked to have me try to find the letter A's. I would purposefully pick the wrong letter and he thought that was the funniest thing. This game did take a little planning on my part. I had to collect five bottle caps from our milk jugs. Luckily, the lids are already colored red, but you could easily paint them. I wrote a capital letter A on each lid. You could mix it up and write lower case letter a's and have them match them to the upper case. I cut the tree from paper and wrote a mix of letters on the tree. I use an old crate from toy packaging to keep our themed games in for easy storage and to help keep the focus on the activity.

PS | Please don't judge the stickers. He always has stickers on his hands.