Graced by Wetzels: Letter B

Another week has passed here at the Wetzel household, and this time we learned all about the letter B! Emily has always loved butterflies, so she was especially excited to see almost every activity this week revolved around them. A lot of these are the same activities from last week, only with butterfly graphics. Repetition is the key to learning at this age, even when they have mastered the skill. In the beginning, I thought she would get bored, but in all reality, how many times did you do the same puzzle as a kid?

I have had a couple of friends ask how much work this was, or say I am way more on top of things than they are. I just want to let everyone know that all this took a lot of work. I have been researching things on and off for the past year and have spent the 6 months printing everything out, laminating it all, and planning out our activities for each day. Nothing like this gets thrown together easily, but it has definitely been worth it all!

Again, if not mentioned, all these ideas and printouts came from Confessions of a Homeschooler.

Day 1: We added another letter to our Chicka Chicka Boom Boom tree. Olivia just HAD to be in the picture, as well. If only she would have smiled.

Letter B tracing. And a headband for the day.

Sorting big B and little b with some help from a little sister who really doesn't help at all.

We have already learned numbers 1-10, but she often gets 4 and 5 confused, or forgets what they are altogether. The next couple of weeks I am planning on going back over the numbers 4+ just to make sure she has them down.

And we are getting more and more comfortable with free handing letters and numbers. Her fours are coming along nicely!

The following is such a simple activity for preschoolers. You really can do it with any manipulative and a regular muffin tin. Just put little numbers in the bottom and have your child count out the correct number. I happened to pick up some "b"utterfly silicon cupcake holders at HEB for $1. I couldn't pass them up. We will definitely be using these again -- they were a hit!

Our weekly puzzle...

More counting practice...

And to conclude day 1, we made a bird feeder that I saw on Pinterest. Unfortunately, our pesky squirrels tore it to pieces over night.

Day 2: We made a B collage with stickers. It would have been smart here to use buttons, but buttons aren't cheap... stickers are.

And, of course, Olivia had to get in the action. We start on those fine motor skills early.

More B handwriting practice. Another resource I found on Pinterest!

Size sorting. Emily knew small and large, but medium was a new one. And I want to make a special shout out to our friend Candace who gave us the most AMAZING flower bow this past weekend. We are constantly looking for outfits to wear it with!

This has been all over the internet, so I don't know who to attribute it to. I ended up using an idea to use $1 hair gel, food coloring, and glitter. Only, I didn't use glitter. I should have. We have already gone out and bought some glitter for next week. It just makes it a little easier to see. We practiced writing all of the letters and numbers we know and Olivia got her own bag to squish around.

Our weekly cutting practice. Gotta keep up with those skills.

This was another idea I saw all over Pinterest. I just used stickers and hand drawn lines. Emily didn't seem to care that it wasn't any fancier.

I promise we are going to get Olivia a haircut this upcoming week.

A butterfly numbers game! Emily was playing against herself, which is nice because she is guaranteed to win. This was the first time to use a die, so it took a couple of tries to figure out how to keep it on the table.

End of day 2 brought coffee filter butterfly painting. I don't know where this idea came from, but it seems to be a basic go-to craft for butterfly making.

Day 3: This was an activity I forgot to post from last week. We rolled out "snakes" and practiced forming the play dough into different letters. We love play dough in this household. It is generally a daily activity for us all. We have been making homemade play dough lately, which is so much fun and smells lovely. I will post the recipe soon.

Play dough and then do-a-dots! Thursday started out right! Again this worksheet came from Beginning Reading.

Another letter path worksheet from the blog Tons of Fun. We also had to mark big E and little e, since those are the most important letters in the alphabet.

Butterfly lacing...

Gummy bear graphing. This was probably our most favorite activity of the week! We learned how a graph works and talked about how to properly read the graph without counting the bears out. We also talked about how we visually see which color has the most and least. I have seen this activity all over the internet and definitely want to start including graphs in our activities every week, or every other week. I figured gummy "b"ears were appropriate and just made a simple graph in excel.

I wanted some kind of writing practice for the 3rd day, so I made this worksheet at Handwriting Worksheets. You can input your own information so it says whatever you want it to. Perfect!

Day 4: We started with letter matching...

Patterns. We are finally picking up the concept.

Butterfly number cards...

So easy to make!

This game is from Mama Jenn. It is suppose to be used with a specially made die you buy called an education cube. You can put different inserts it specific to your game/activity. I just used a regular die and we counted spaces. It still was appropriate because of the bird on the game board.