A is for Acorn!

School has officially started with a bang in the Dollighted house.  

Here is what our Monday schedule looks like:

Monday - Chores, breakfast, life, etc - first, Library, Calendar Time, Library Book, Craft, Uppercase A page, and "dittos" about the Capital letter

As always we did our Calendar Time.  We have been practicing our Month and Day songs for almost a week now, and She-she seems to be getting the hang of it pretty well.  We also pulled in our first exercise in "charting" with the Weather Chart, matching up the symbols from the weather we charted last week and coloring them in on the page in the proper place.  I was shocked how much this excited her, the idea of seeing what the weather was last week and how it will compare to this week really made her happy.

To sort of ease her into school again after a long summer of relaxing, I chose to start off with an A week.  She-she's name starts with A, so its one she's hugely familiar with and can write out pretty easily.

My goals this week are to hit our Wow's, which are:

Letter of the Week ~~ A
Number of the Week ~~ 8
Color of the Week ~~ Amarillo / Yellow
Animal of the Week ~~ Alligator
Food of the Week ~~ Apple
Shape of the Week ~~ Circle

So our first focus after the library and calendar was our Library book.

We learned about the Long A sound (A as in Acorn!) and the goal here was to read a book about Acorns.

We read Scared Squirrel goes Camping by Melanie Watt.  I had wanted Little Acorn Grows Up by Edward Gibbs, but that happened to be checked out and though I reserved it last Thursday and it said it was on the shelf it wasn't yet to my library~so make sure if you're putting books on hold you give yourself about a week for books to come in! :'(

This book, even though not what I first pictured ended up being adorable, and there were plenty of acorns for us to count throughout the book as well.  The other thing I loved about Scaredy Squirrel was how many fun interactive pieces there was to the story.

We had maps, complete with a cool key that we used to interpret the map:

We had graphs, there even happened to be a weather graph, which we had just charted and She-she was excited to compare to what we'd just done:

And several ways to interact physically with the book, like this warm up routine:

We had so much fun doing all the acting out of Scaredy Squirrel's adventures that it took us a while to get through the book, which is fine with me - it kept us away from the TV for almost a half hour itself!

She-she's Acorn

Once we completed our library book we decided to make our own Acorn project, which I snagged from Pinterest and a blog called "No Time for Flash Cards" which is super awesome by the way!

No Time for Flash Card's project

 
I didn't get the opportunity to run to the store for the brown paper bags, so we used orange and yellow construction paper.

After Craft time we did our dittos. An A page to practice her capital letters.  As my daughter doesn't love to focus through an entire page of letters, we focused only on the uppercase A.  I love this set from The Moffatt Girls.

I also picked up a book from Target called, Workbook Rhyme Time, A Frog on the Log - unfortunately I can't find it online to link it, sorry.

We did the "AT" page, and then wrote on our chalkboard.  I think this was almost She-she's favorite part of the game (She loves writing on her easel) and she loved putting different letters in front of "-at" and deciding if it said a real word or a "funny" word.

That's what our first day of school looked like - what are your favorite Acorn projects?