Letter A a – Preschool at Home

The main focus of our preschool time is letters.  We are using the Letter of the Week curriculum offered by Erica at Confessions of a Homeschooler, one of my favorite blogs.  As I mentioned in my Preschool – Getting Started post, Bryson knew a lot more than even I realized.  He can recognize most letters, tell you the sound(s) they make, and tell you a word (usually an animal) that begins with the letter.  As much as I would love to take credit for that, I can’t.  I bought the LeapFrog Letter Factory DVD for him for Christmas and within just a couple weeks, he knew most of his letters, sounds, etc.  It’s pretty amazing and at under $10, it’s totally worth it!  LeapFrog has a few shows on Netflix too- our favorite is Phonics Farm if you want to check it out.

Preschool for us isn’t very strict as far as how we spend our time, how long it takes, etc.  I print a week’s worth of “work” ahead of time, then I allow Bryson to pick and choose what he’d like to do daily.  The only exceptions are calendar time, reciting the pledge of allegiance, and going over our memory verse- we do those things every day.

A few things we did to help learn letter A:

– listen to our Fridge Phonics which tells you the sound(s) a letter makes
– traced letter A and talked about the difference in big (capital) A and little (lowercase) a
– played a game sorting little and big As
– sorted ants from largest to smallest
– colored pictures of apples
– colored a few do-a-dot pages (astronaut & big/ little A)
– put together our alphabet train puzzle
– watched Letter Factory and Phonics Farm
– talked about words that start with the letter a
– read about book about little a (we have the A – Z First Steps to Reading book set)

Our first week went very well.  Bryson focused on his “preschool” (it’s SO cute to hear him say that!) for up to an hour a few days, then other days he was finished within 30 minutes.  I found that if I used the word game, he would perk up and become interested.  We used Bella’s morning nap time as our school time and I think he thoroughly enjoyed the one-on-one time with me.   We are learning vowels first, then we’ll work our way through the entire alphabet.  I’m very excited to watch Bryson learn and enjoy the process.  I never, ever wanted to be a teacher, but I LOVE being my kid’s teacher!