C is For Collin

For a while now I have wanted to come up with some sort of plan for teaching Collin at home.  He loves learning & picks up on things so quickly that I want to encourage him and try to continue to present new ideas and activities to him.

We are pretty busy with 3 out of 5 mornings scheduled to be out of the house, but I thought that we still had plenty of down time to squeeze some learning in!

After hours of wasting time on Pinterest & Blogs, then finally getting some good advice from my really smart teacher sister, I decided to just make it fun and no-pressure.  Becca also suggested starting with the letters in his name – which I thought was a fabulous idea!

So…the past 2 weeks have been “C is for Collin”!!  Basically we read books, pick out words starting with “C”, sing songs about the sound letter “C” makes, and other fun things.  Collin gets really excited now whenever he sees a letter C in a new place :)

One of the first things we did last week was make a craft using “C is for Caterpillar”.  Basically I let him draw on a piece of green construction paper…see Gracie supervising??  She wanted the markers sooooo badly!!

Then I traced circles on an orange page in the shape of the letter.

I cut out matching circles from Collin’s “picture” and let him use a glue stick to put them in place.  He LOVED that part!

Then we drew on a face, antennae, and feet.  So cute!  He still loves looking at it & showing it off to anyone who will look :) 

Another fun idea I had was to use his matchbox cars to make the letter.  After we practiced a few times this is his “C” that he made all by himself!!  And he is the one that picked out all the orange cars to use :)

We are having fun with it & I am so happy with how well he did.  Up next is the letter “O” which he already knows, so that should be pretty quick.

Also a first today, Collin James wrote his name!!!!  I know that I am probably the only one who can read it, and it was actually much easier to read the first time he wrote it, but he kept wanting to do it over and over again, so this is what we ended up with.  His “C” and “o” are really great, and it is pretty easy to draw an “l”.  His favorite is the “i” because he thinks the dot on top is fun :)  The “n” is tough, but I thought he did pretty awesome for his first ever attempt!!