A is for Alligator

So we've been focusing on apples and the letter Aa this week, but today we went wild and pulled out some Alligator activities! :) In our Kumon Let's Fold book, I found an alligator.That was super-fun. I love watching her little fingers crease the folds!

Our alligator turned into a frog when we folded it up. Magic!

We made alligator "Mail" and used ASL to sign alligator. We also sang Five Little Monkeys and SNAPPED those monkeys off the tree! We crawled on the ground like an alligator, and then we googled swamp to see where alligators live. While we were on the computer, we did the Letter A activities on www.StarFall.com.

After nap, we worked on the rest of our Kumon books.
We worked on Let's Color (not an alligator page, since we are going in order in that book).

Then we did Let's Cut- cut out a spider web- (Kenna's choice)

We also started Let's Trace- It was Animals at the zoo (hooray for letter A) but she got angry because her green crayon broke so we put it away for another day. Oh, and we would have done
Let's Sticker and Paste but we skipped it because our glue was in "time out" from some misuse earlier...

While I was making lunch, Kenna worked on this Alligator activity. All you need is this printout from www.homeschoolcreations.com (love this site! I borrow/ steal ideas from it all the time.) and some manipulatives. (Pom poms with magnets, glass floral marbles, or Do-A-Dot Markers are our go-to manipulatives.) We could have saved apple seeds for this activity, or cut some out of black foam. I gave her green floral marbles. I only provide enough manipulatives to exactly cover the missing spots, or it gets too overwhelming for my toddler. Sometimes I put them in a little bowl. Sometimes I give her tongs.

I don't have the time/money to laminate most of our activities, so I just put the worksheets in a sheet protector and lay it on a cookie sheet (great when you are need to contain rolling objects, or when you need magnets to stick).


Thursday is usually our Library Day, so we read all of our current books one last time (all focused on apples and gardening this week) and then get books for next week. This serves to keep our book selection fresh, and to allow me to start pre-teaching the next week's theme/letter over the weekend. At 2 years old, we only check out 5 books a week. That gives us lots of time to read each one multiple times. We have gabillions of books here at the house for free reading, so the books we get from the library are always theme based. (unless kenna grips a book tightly and declares "my love it!". :) Today we'll probably also find an Alligator book or two to reinforce our learning.

*I'd love to go to the library on Fridays, but that just doesn't work with our schedule, so Thursday it is!