First week of Home School (Letter A)

This has been a fun and challenging first week of home school. Jeremy and I have been excited to see Ivelina learning. Despite a little bit of resistance, a little bit of stubbornness, and a lot of "all done schoo?," Ivelina has learned a lot. It hasn't been all struggle though. She has loved many of the Letter of the Week activities. Here is a sample of what she did this week!  

One of Ivelina's favorite activities was one we did on Friday). Many of our letter A books this week described how to make apple pies. We used Apple Pie for Dinner retold by Susan VanHecke and The Apple Pie Tree by Zoe Hall. We did an easier kid-friendly version of apple pie. We started with Grands biscuits and rolled them out. Then we put a mixture of apples, cinnamon, and sugar in the center of each biscuits and synched up each one. Then, we sprinkled more cinnamon + sugar on top and baked them for 12 minutes. Ivelina was so patient and was a big helper with this project!

Ivelina cutting up the apples (with a butter knife!). She really got into it!

Ivelina sprinkling cinnamon and sugar on the pie after she had filled it with apples. Note the large amount of sugar in her hair.

Placing the pies in the pan.

Enjoying the fruit of her labor of course!  They turned out yummy!

For a girl who used to be so stressed out and ravenous over food, Ivelina has come so far that now she can help with simple cooking activities. This is amazing to me, especially when I remember how her relationship with food was during our pick up week back in June.

This week, Ivie also loved the LOTW activity: making an Aa collage. We filled the letters with Apple Jacks!  This activity doubled as a snack.

Another book that we read a lot this week was The Seasons of Arnold's Apple Tree by Gail Gibbons. What a cute book!  It follows an apple tree through all four seasons. We read it for four days in a row and made an apple tree each day, one for every season. Ivie loves to glue and she is pretty skilled with a glue stick. This was a favorite thing for her to do each day!

Ivelina cheesin' it with all four of the apple trees she made this week.

And one final LOTW activity that Ivelina enjoyed was the letter A sticker page. You are supposed to use Do-a-Dot markers on this page, but I don't have any yet, so we used stickers. Ivelina loves stickers!

By the end of the week, Ivelina had learned tons of new vocabulary. She knows the parts of the apple: skin, stem, seed. She also learned the words apple tree, apple pie, snow, cinnamon, sugar, and leaves. She can easily recognize both the upper and lower case Aa's now, and she is very skilled at writing big "A" both with markers and with pencil. Little "a" is a bit more challenging for her to form, but she does pretty good with dry erase markers. Ivelina loved using abcmouse.com this week too. She is learning a song for letter "a" and she is learning "Old MacDonald Had a Farm." Ivelina hates coloring usually, but toward the end of the week, she did some of her best coloring yet when she completed her letter Aa coloring page. We also found out that she can see and recognize colors. I was very suspicious that she was color blind, but we think she was just never taught taught colors in Bulgarian. She did several color activities this week, and did them very well! SO much improvement!  I love teaching and seeing lights come on for students, but when it is your own child whose lights are coming on, it is even more special. 

Next week: letter E here we come!

Thanks for reading,

Shelly

For more info on Letter of the Week Curriculum click here