The Plan

Letter A: Apple Art to form letter A.
Sight Word: Elkonin boxes. Writing with over dots.
Math: 1&2 Motion activity: One hand up, two hands up, one hand down, one foot up, etc.. may progress to Simon says.
Theme: Animal Sounds: Practice sounds with each animal. Down on grandpa’s farm. Old McDonald

What Actually Happened

Theme: Animal Sounds: Practice sounds with each animal and songs, “Down on Grandpa’s farm” and “Old McDonald”
We started with aby watching the “Old McDonald” and “Down and Grandpa’s Farm” on YouTube.  I stopped the videos before the animal sounds to see if the kids could identify the sounds. We used the Little Tykes book to make the sound of the farm animals. For some reason, Panda still gets cows and horses confused?!?! Koala is actually shining in this area and knows almost all of the farm animal sounds.

Sight Word: Elkonin boxes. Writing with over dots.
We have only used Elkonin Boxes or sound boxes once before. The point of this activity is to be able to separate sounds of words, not necessarily letters.  For example the word “see” has only two sound boxes because the only sounds are “s” and long “e”.  This prereading and prewriting activity can help kids identify beginning, middle, and ending sounds and can also help them visualize a word.  I decided just to use the 2 boxes for words with 2 sounds, we haven’t gone passed that yet. The kids definitely need more support in this area, but were able to put their fingers in the boxes and follow along. Panda is beginning to progress to pointing to the right box for a sound after we do it together several times. We then practiced writing the word out. I am trying to get Panda to do as much fine motor as possible, he seems to need more focus in this area. Then we played the animals in game again. Grizzly was still asleep and the big kids really wanted to play it

Math: 1&2 Motion activity: One hand up, two hands up, one hand down, one foot up, etc.. may progress to Simon says.
This activity didn’t go very well. I asked the kids to put up one hand, then stamp two feet, the put two hands on their heads, etc… The kids were all over the place and not listening. I will admit defeat. We will go back to this activity in the future.  Listening to direction was simply not our strong point today.

Letter A: Apple Art to form letter A.
We ended with our art activity, but of course, Grizzly woke up just in time to join in the messy fun. I just wrote the capital letter A on a piece of paper. I used paint and an apple and showed the kids how to stamp the apple on the paper.  I tried to get them to stay on the lines to actually make the letter A. They did pretty awesome on their own. For some reason, Grizzly ended up with paint all over him even though the paint was too high for him to reach.