Homeschool Week 2: All About Apples

This week, we focused on the letter A and apples!

We read some wonderful apple themed books, including...



The Apple Pie Tree by Zoe Hall



The Seasons of Arnold's Apple Tree by Gail Gibbons



Apple Picking Time by Michele B Slawson



and Up, Up, Up!  It's Apple Picking Time by Jody Fickes Shapiro.

We made a paint and thumbprint apple craft from a paper plate.

We also identified capital and lower case A.  Toodles used a bingo marker to dot the capital A's and drew a circle around the lowercase a's.

Our other art project was apple printing on a lowercase "a."  This page will go into a binder where we will have one artistic representation for each letter as we learn it.

Our tot trays this week were...

An "apple picking game."  (Disclaimer: yes, a lot of my stuff is hand-drawn.  I'm channeling my inner Laura Ingalls Wilder.  Actually, I just don't have a working PC at the moment to make these things all fancy-like, so I draw them myself.  It turns out, I'm not spectacular with technology.  I blame my mother.  And someday, my children will blame me).

So, the apple picking game.

We have these super cool little sugar tongs from Sur La Table.  They are the perfect size for Toodles' hands and, um, $2.95.  We placed red, yellow and green pom pom "apples" on the tree.  Then, we rolled a number cube, and practiced "picking" that number of apples from the tree.  Toodles transferred them from the tree to the grid below using the sugar tongs.  This game was a HUGE hit.  He absolutely loved transferring.

Our second tot tray was a set of sequencing cards.  Again, these were hand made.  I even pressed the ink from wild berries.  Ok, not really.
Toodles sequenced pictures of an apple being eaten...

and of an apple tree growing.

Our third tot tray was our rice bin.  Toodles found letters in the rice, then placed them into the appropriate letter frame.

Our fourth tot tray, as always, was Toodles' book bag filled with apple-themed books.