Letter A with Notebooking

This is going to be a looong post, but we did lots of fun activities, and I have some resources to share as well.

I don't "make" A(4.5) do school at this point, I suggest activities and if he's game then we go with it, most days he's game. We spent about 3 weeks on our letter A activities because we really only focused on it about one day a week.

We kicked off our week with these really fun printables from Carissa at 1+1+1. 

She has printables for most letters up, but not all. I printed the pages on half sheets and they were still plenty big enough to have fun with. I normally would have laminated these but since my laminator is currently out of service, I couldn't, and I'm glad! We ended up using this single item for SO many activities.

We started with a couple of suggestions from Carissa's "Ideas for Using" page. First I buried the picture cards in a bowl of split peas (it's what I had on hand) and A used a set of plastic tweezers to find the picture and match it to the picture board. He refused to put the cards on the board, but chose to line them up around the outside instead. He and J continued to do this on and off throughout the day. As he found the pictures we talked about the letter A, the sounds it makes, and what each of the pictures were.

Then I read the "clues" on the word cards and A matched up the corresponding pictures.

We used the Alligator A and several of the Alligator Extras from Carissa's Animal ABC section.

He diligently cut out the alligators for the Alligator A. The tongue cracks me up! He does that every time he cuts, super concentration.

His finished Alligator A

Alligator colors. A has known his colors for a long time, but still gets confused with black/gray and pink/purple. I colored with him at his request :).

Hard to see because it's in pencil, but he used this printable to trace.

I've recently become really interested in Notebooking, and our first attempts have been very successful. I saw a post with Alphabet Notebooking pages and I really liked the idea, but they weren't exactly what I wanted. I needed something with minimal writing and lots of free artistic space since A has zero writing skills at this point, and that's not the area I'm focusing on. I made my own pages using Microsoft Word. I can not figure out how to get the file to link up properly, one day I'll figure it out and share it with you. If you want the link please leave me a comment and I will send it via email.

I pulled out some of the picture cards from Carissa's ABC Find it printable and A glued them into the picture space at the top of the page. I also gave him this great letter limerick from this site. I printed them 9 to a page (by using multi-page print) so they would be small enough for the notebooking page.

Here are his first two notebooking pages all filled up
The apple, A/a sort, and little A Book came from here. They were part of an full A lapbook but I just printed off the pages I wanted to use. There is also an alligator poem that we will be including in his book, I don't have it pictured.

 

 
He also did this color by letter picture from here. This site requires you to sign up for a membership, but it's free.

Finally we used some more of the ABC Find It cards to make mini-books. I had these mini-books on hand because they printed with a separate (generic) notebooking page that J used in the last week. Since we already hand them on hand, I threw this idea together. Besides, what kid doesn't love a lift the flap book?

We also built the letter A out of K*Nex because I randomly thought of it when A had them out.