...to an Alphabet Path Party!
We finished up the Alphabet Path for Kindergarten in early May, and at the end of Z week, we had a party to celebrate and to remember our trip down the path! Caroline recited some of her poems she has memorized throughout the year, and we prepared some celebratory snacks!
The girls helped to dip pretzel rods into melted white chocolate chips and then sprinkle them in pastel colors to make fairy wands! We did this the day before the party.
Licking the bowl was apparently the best part!
They helped me make frosting for our alphabet cupcakes... they were really a pumpkin cake recipe from the King Arthur whole grain baking cookbook, and topped with a ginger cream cheese frosting, they were scrumptious!
Here's our table, all set for the party! We had a parade of saints, a parade of flower fairies, and a parade of alphabet cupcakes! The girls helped to tear streamers for us to hang in the doorway, and we had left the streamers on the chairs from one of our garden parties a few weeks back.
I made little party favor bags for the girls with some items I found at the craft store in the dollar bins! Technically, this was a birthday party, since the last story of the Alphabet Path is about the main character, Michael, taking a bouquet of flowers (which he collected as he met the flower fairies) to his mother for her birthday. The flower fairies have a parade with him back to his house to surprise his mother. So this was like a role-playing of her birthday party.
The fairy wands
The alphabet cupcakes were done in some pretty floral cupcake liners that I also found at the craft store! I frosted a letter on each cupcake in pink or green frosting. U and V shared a cupcake, as did X and Y, so a batch of 24 cupcakes was just perfect!
The first 13 letters fit on our cupcake stand, and the rest spilled off to the side in a parade of cupcakes!
The girls opened up their party favor bags first...
They found fairy notecards, fairy stamps, and wooden fairy figurines to color. As you can see, they dressed up in fancy dress-up clothes for the party!
They wanted to color the fairies right away! I had also included some stick-on jewels they used to decorate them. I finished setting up the snacks while they worked.
Here are some of the saints and fairies on parade... I made them face both directions so that everyone at the table could see some of them. I had been painting the saints all along throughout the year, and the fairies were made like this: I found the images online and pasted them into a document. Then I printed them in high quality on cardstock, cut them out, and attached them to toothpicks. I stuck each toothpick in half of a cork so they would stand up. i knew that all those corks I gathered from my parents' house would come in handy for something! ;)
an aerial view
Here is Caroline's wooden fairy figurine... the stick-on jewels made for a nice touch!
And then it was time to eat!!!
Yum! We also had apple juice mixed with a bit of Sierra Mist to make a "punch" and some red grapes.
Cecilia chooses a fairy wand
This was such a fun way to wrap up the year, and the Alphabet Path itself was a fun and gentle way to ease into homeschooling in this first year. I will be saving all these ideas so that Cecilia can walk the path when she is in Kindergarten, and again for baby #3! Caroline learned to work so well this first year, and her drawing and letter formation improved alongside her fine motor skills. And having taught herself to read right before we even started the Alphabet Path, I'd say she is well on her way to first grade!!
