What We Did In Homeschool: Dental Health Week / Letter A

Okay, so before I begin this series, it is really important for me to say, I am a terrible homeschool mom when it comes to the by the book teaching. I love the crafts and games and organization. But I cannot for the life of get it together to do it every day like I plan. I also never do circle time, in fact, I shudder at the thought.

I think it's because I worked in a daycare for a while, where circle time was a must must must. But I just sat there and saw all the kids bored, and not engaged at all. They knew their ABC's and rhyming songs, yes. But they were bored and so was I! So we don't do that. We forgo my carefully thought out lesson to take a walk and go Pokemon hunting, or play on the iPad, or bake cookies. And that's okay by me. Because she's four and I'm happier when we're doing fun things. I don't think she needs to know any of this stuff yet, we basically do it for fun and because she has shown an interest in it. I am not the mom pressuring her to learn how to recognize every letter because Sally up the street is only three and is already reading classic literature.

Nope. We like dirt, fun, and total chaos around here. So we're just keeping ourselves busy and learning to love learning.

That being said, this is what we DID accomplish this week!

I wish I could show the pictures of E completing her work. She pretty much had a blast for all the things we did, even though they were pretty standard.

First of all, we started letter of the week. GROAN. I did not want to do this. I am more of a montessori minded kinda gal, and letter of the week seems too cookie cutter for me. Alas, E really wants to learn her letters and learn to read, and we have been struggling. I thought focusing on one letter a week would be good. So we've done something with the letters each day this week.

M - A is for Alligator craft (This backfires when mommy can't stop saying crocodile instead)
T - Color in every letter Aa to reveal... bwahaha AN A!
W - a is for apple craft
T - A in sign language


Monday - A is for Alligator
I can't show the picture of this because E is in them and I don't want to show her face in blog posts like this as much as I can help it. But you can see the outcome in the header image. Basically, turn that A sideways (I precut mine out of construction paper for her) and have her glue on teeth and giant googly eyes if you're cool like us.
Prep Time: 5 Minutes
Prep: Cut out A, cut out teeth
Busy Time: 10 Minutes

Tuesday - Color in Every Letter Aa

This is a print out that will be available for purchase eventually, I'm still working my way through the letters. Basically there are a ton of letters in boxes, they have to find all the letter A or a and color in that box. It reveals... dun dun dun... another letter A! I am binding these in a book for her so she gets to look back at all the hard work she's done. This was her least favorite thing to do this week, but that's because she is lazy and didn't want to have to color every one. Punk.
Prep Time: None
Prep: Print 
Busy Time: 30 minutes (again, she was a whiner)

Wednesday - a is for apple 

Another simple craft. But it gets the point across somehow. I think we're going to hang them all up in her room as we go along so she can remember the letters (hopefully). Just cut out the letter a and a lead and have your LO glue on paper. Simple but allows you time to talk to them about the letter.
Prep Time: 5 Minutes
Prep: Precut letter a and the leaf
Busy Time: >5 Minutes

Thursday - A in Sign Language
Explaining sign language to a 4 year old is especially hard when you don't know sign language yourself. I can't get her to understand the concept of letters hardly, and now I'm throwing in signs as well. Too soon for us? Maybe. But we'll give it a go. She thought this was incredibly cool once she learned it. We are printing out clip art we're finding online to hang on her wall.
Prep Time: >5 Minutes
Prep: Finding and printing clip art
Busy Time: >5 Minutes



As far as dental health week went, we had a lot of fun there too! We had several projects to do!

Wipe Away the Tooth Decay!

Prep: Printing smile and laminating paper

Busy Time: Endless! She even asked to do this again the next day.

 This is a pretty common dental health week activity. We laminated the smile and drew on it with dry erase marker. Most people use a toothbrush to wipe it away, but I just used a toothpick because I didn't have an old toothbrush and wasn't going to get a new one. She played this for such a long time and was so proud to show daddy when he got home. She also made the smile go around and "eat candy" before she gave him tooth decay and made him happy when he was eating vegetables!

Tooth Number Jump

Prep: Cutting out tooth shape, writing on numbers

Busy Time: Endless again, have them jump on the right number as long as you want!

This is another simple one that turned out great. I shouted out a number and she had to go find it and stand on it. We're working on recognizing numbers 1-20.

 

What makes your tooth happy/sad?

Prep: Cutting out teeth shapes, cutting out food (both good and bad)

Busy Time: About 15 Minutes

First I had to cut out the giant teeth shapes. I just used printer paper and eyeballed it. I drew a happy smile on one and a sad frown on the other. I had E glue on googly eyes (because everything is better with googly eyes). Then she cut out all the food types. Then we sat down and discussed what makes something good for your teeth or bad for your teeth. Then we guessed which one was good for your teeth (these went on the smile) and what was bad for your teeth (these went on the frown). Quick, easy, and makes them think critically!

What did you do in homeschool this week?  

We also painted pine cones, just for fun! We have a huge pine tree in our front yard, so after our walk we stopped and picked out the best ones. We DID NOT get the critters out of these before we started crafting with them, and that was a mistake because they were everywhere. But it was a lot of fun for her to scream in faux fear every time a new one came out. This is just proof that not everything has to be a lesson at this age! Some things can just be fun!