Letter A - Day Nine

I'm pretty sure today is our last day doing letter A. 

We started with poking holes to "trace" the letter Aa. I used a marker to write Aa on a blank postcard (1/4 of card stock). I have some extra large and giant pushpins. We used the extra large ones. I had her put the card over her beanbag chair to make it easier to push the pins through without poking herself. A carpeted surface would work also. It makes an interesting effect when holding the paper up to the light. This could also be done on tin pie pans (aluminum pans).

Next we used play-doh to make the letter Aa and to "follow" the Aa maze.

Lastly we decorated her lapbook with "A" pictures. These were the pictures she had used her cutting skills in earlier in the week so as to not waste all of them.

Letter A - Day 8

Day eight was website/video day.

We started at Starfall and did the Letter A and vowel a games. Then we went to Easy Peasy Homeschool for the April the Alligator story. Then off to YouTube to watch some "A" videos.

Letter A - Day Seven

Today we used the computer and worked on the ABCMouse website. I had organized all the Letter A activities that I could find into a "lesson" for her. She has pretty good mouse control so I let her pick which activities from the list that she wanted to do. 

She did ---

Puzzles

Mazes, bubbles

Matching, songs, picking the right one, and more.

While I was cleaning and putting up her nebulizer parts, I gave her 10 minutes or so of free time to do whichever ABCMouse activities that she wanted to do.

Letter A - Day Six

So we once again started off with pre-writing skills. I used one of the more progressive sheets. She wasn't thrilled with doing it since it wasn't easy. I must remember to keep the "harder" ones to a minimum for a while longer. I don't want to completely to stop using them, because as she gets better at the tasks they will become easier. 

We then did one of the taller cutting skills worksheets. Because the lines were curved on it, she wasn't thrilled with it either and only did 2 of the 3 lines. I think with these I need to stick with straight lines for now as she has trouble doing the longer/taller cuts as it is.

Next we played the "how many seeds does the apple have" game that I had attached to her lapbook. We took turns drawing "cards" and putting "seeds" on the apple (numbers were from 1-10).

Next up was Apple patterns. She didn't quite understand what we were doing with the first pattern. She started getting the idea with the second pattern, but was done with it and didn't want to do anymore. (There were 10 different pattern sheets.)

To end the night, we looked through the A-word cards, read our "A" books, and sang the "at" song. We have sang the "at" song several different times during the week. She pretty much has the song memorized. She just doesn't realize that it actually spells a word. I'm hoping exposure will eventually help it to sink in.

I've also have been trying to incorporate the letter theme into our bedtime story readings. So far we have read 6 of the 8 books below and will read the other 2 soon. I'm using books that we already have in our "library" instead of buying new books or hunting down books in the county library. 

Note: I will be adding links to sites from which I pulled all the different things at a later time.

Letter A - Day Five

Once again, we started off with pre-writing skills. These sheets were a little tougher for her. They weren't straight lines. She wanted to rush through them so she didn't take the time to learn to stop and change directions with the pencil.

Next we did a "is it different" sheet.

Then we did some more cutting skills strips with apples on them She also did full sheet Alice cutting sheet. After she got through cutting the Alice one, she told me it looked like a curtain. LOL.

Sorting was next on the agenda. She used her lapbook to separate upper-case "A"  and lower-case "a"s into the correct buckets. She also placed apples on the correct letters on the tree in her lapbook.

Lastly, we did a variety of jigsaw puzzles with an A-word theme.

Note: I will be adding links to sites from which I pulled all the different things at a later time.

Letter A - Day 4

We once again started our Letter A lesson with some pre-writing skills.

Next she matched upper-case "A" and lower-case "a" with an ambulance themed sheet.

 

We then colored ambulances by size - small ambulances were purple, medium ambulances were green, and large ambulances were red. Notice that only the small ambulances received more than one little scribble. LOL.

 

Next, she worked on cutting skills by cutting apart strips of ambulances and by cutting up a big sheet of ambulances.

 

Lastly, I used some of the sheets that I had laminated and some of the wipe-off flash cards she got for Christmas. Three of these were "maze" sheets. Two of these were sight words - one for the word "a" and one for the word "at". Randomly during the week, we have also practiced the "at" song too. The rest were various pre-writing skills.

Note: I will be adding links to sites from which I pulled all the different things at a later time.

Letter A - Day Three

Day three of the Letter A started with more pre-writing worksheets.

Next we glued together an Alice in Wonderland "over-under-beside" worksheet.

Then she colored the "A" stars yellow.

Next she colored in her "It starts with A" book and glued it into her lapbook.

She then sorted apples into the Small, Medium, and Big pockets of her lapbook (with a little help from big sister, Ellie).

Lastly, she and Ellie did some Shadow Matching with "Astronaut" and "Alice" cards.

 

Note: I will be adding links to sites from which I pulled all the different things at a later time.

Letter A - Day Two

Our day two of working with the Letter A started with some pre-writing worksheets. Olivia decided she needed to write her name on one. Check out the grip on the pencil in that last picture. LOL.

The second thing we did was a "dot" A from the Alice in Wonderland Pack. I don't have any of the dot markers at the moment, but I had picked up some dot stickers (like these at Amazon) and used those instead. So she put stickers on the "A is for Alice". She liked doing this one so much that she insisted that we put it on the refrigerator.

Then she colored in the "Letter Aa" book from This Reading Mama and glued into her lapbook.

After that we practiced some cutting skills by cutting a part some strips with letter A words (ant, apple, astronaut, alligator) on them.

Lastly we put together some of her A-themed Number Order jigsaw puzzles from her lapbook.

Note: I will be adding links to sites from which I pulled all the different things at a later time.

Letter A - Day One

We started our preschool homeschool during CF treatments with the Letter A.

The first thing I had Olivia do was the first lesson in the ClickN READ Phonics program (will some pics/links to this later.) The first lesson of this program focuses on the letters A and M. Olivia was able to mostly do this program on her own since she has some computer mouse skills already. A child without mouse skills will need some help. This lesson went over the phonetic sounds of the two letters, words beginning with those sounds, and the word "am". Olivia did really well with the sounds of the letters not so much with the rest, but that will come with time and growth. I'm working more for exposure right now, not mastery.

We then did a pre-writing worksheet and a "what is different" sheet from the Alice in Wonderland Pack. I didn't think to get pictures this first day so these to sheets are wrinkled from where we were getting ready to throw them in the recycle bin. LOL.

Lastly we read some of our "A" books.

• It Begins with A
• Letter Aa - This Reading Mama
• The Colorful World of Alice in Wonderland - 123 Homeschool 4 Me

This is a picture of the books from later in the week. 

Note: I will be adding links to sites from which I pulled all the different things at a later time.

Preschool Homeschooling the CF Way - Introduction

One of Olivia's current treatments for Cystic Fibrosis is Pulmozyme which requires the use of a nebulizer machine. This makes the particles of medicine small enough for Olivia to breath into her lungs. The Pulmozyme works by thinning the mucous and making it easier for her to expel from her lungs. The nebulizer takes about 15 minutes to run. About two weeks ago, I order a nebulizer strap from an Etsy store ( marie's stuff ) to use with her "Bubbles the Fish" mask. Once we received the strap Olivia was able to move around a little bit more since the mask didn't fall off as easily. So Olivia and I started doing jigsaw puzzles during that time That got me to thinking this would be a good time to get a little bit of "learning" in. I started planning some homeschool projects/lessons that didn't require a lot of movement and could be done in short "bursts" over several days per project/lesson.

I started thinking about the fact that I haven't used the blog in a while since I moved Olivia's health updates on to a Facebook group and decided to use it to document our mini homeschool sessions.

Right now I'm going to do some quick outlines of our sessions, but will be editing the posts later to add pictures and links to the materials or programs I am using.

One of the things, I decide to do was to NOT go through the alphabet in order. We started with the letter A and the second letter will be M. One of the reasons for this is to help improve random letter recognition. Another thing I decide to do was to use multiple subjects for each letter. This was so that she would understand that "A was for ..." not only apple, but also ant, astronaut, Alice, arrow, ambulance, etc.

I'm trying to incorporate various skills into the overall lessons. Most likely not all in one session, but over the length of the lesson. Some of the skills we will be working on will be: pre-writing motor skills, cutting skills, counting and number recognition, letter recognition and sounds, beginning phonics, sight words, jigsaw puzzles, shape recognition, color recognition, different/same, and more.

I plan on using a lapbook setup for the main part of our lessons. This way we can go back and review later and so we can play the games in the lapbook whenever we want.