Alphabet School - "I"

True to my word, we have continued exploring the world around us via a trip through the alphabet. Just a reminder, the letter isn't so important for teaching Charlotte her alphabet or how to read, but is most important in guiding me to select new activites for her to particiapte in.

We started our I week by making an igloo with cut up construction paper. For Charlotte, the best part was being allowed to use the glue stick for a long time. She loves "coloring" with it, but hasn't 100% figured out that it is meant for sticking the "ice blocks" to the blue igloo. Charlotte also liked sitting in her new school desk. It is an old-fashioned piece I picked up at a recent consignment sale. There is even an opening under the seat to store things... I am thinking of adding her coloring books and crayons there so she can access them on her own, thereby learning to entertain herself more often.

Then, coincidentally, the book at our favorite children's museum storytime was Incredible ME!. This was perfect for us this week. Charlotte has a strong preference for markers and it is easier to let her use them at the museum where there are some older kids who can influence her appropriate use of them (i.e. not drawing on herself). This was a fun book to read and I would like to get a copy of it for our permanent home collection. I had planned to make a life-size drawing of her this week, but we ran out of time.

Another glue stick and coloring activity this week was these construction paper ice cream cones. She was especially pleased with the cones that had 2 scoops. Because then again, 2 is her favorite number. We tried colored pencils for the first time with this project and they didn't go over so well, so we switched to crayons. And for those of you wondering, those are blueberry and strawberry flavored scoops. Charlotte insisted on it. Something that older kids could do with these is to actually glue on paper sprinkles to make this 3-dimensional.

I brought out our insects again and Charlotte played on of her favorite new pretend games - train! She likes to pretend all sorts of things are in a train and lines them all up. This is our insect train and that is all she really wanted to do with the insects. I thought about letting her make tiny insect prints by dipping them into paint, but just didn't have the energy this week to clean up the mess. We'll break out the paints next week.

We did do one messy project - make ice cream! I found a small, manual ice cream maker at the thrift store months ago for just $2 and have been waiting for this week to try it out. It had a simple recipe on the side of the box and we just had to stir the ingredients together before adding them to the frozen, half-pint sized bowl. Charlotte enjoyed stirring the most... she always does. I can't even stir eggs without her running into the kitchen yelling, "stir, me stir!" This activity was a lot of fun and we did it twice.

The recipe that came with the ice cream maker was super sweet though, so Charlotte only ate a little bit of it. I think next time we will reduce the sugar content and add some fruit. Oh, and if you try this at home, make sure you use egg substitute! My recipe called for raw eggs, but I didn't think it was a good idea for anyone in our house to eat raw eggs. And this small "ice cream maker" is very versatile... expect to see it again next week when we study the letter J.

And our final alphabet school project for the week was to play with Charlotte's initials. She has had fun all week moving them around and rearranging their order. It was all I could do to get her to sit still for 10 seconds so I could take this picture of her. Charlotte has been like that a lot lately... never sitting still more a minute or two, always bouncing and spinning and jumping all over the house. The girl is wearing me out!

Thanks to Mozi Esme for all the great ideas this week!