Aa Week ~ Cecilia Begins Kindergarten!

 

Cecilia began Kindergarten with A week a few weeks ago, before we went on vacation to the beach!  Here are the highlights of her start to the school year!

 

Traditional "first day of school" photo by the front door... don't ask me why it is always by the front door; I have no idea.  But Cecilia was happy to be included in the "first day" photos this year!

 

She made letter Aa using play dough...

 

...and tracing in cornmeal.

 

She heard the story and song of the Apple Blossom Fairy.  She has been so, so excited about getting to color the flower fairies this year - like, more excited than I would think one could be over coloring.  She really loves to color, and to draw.

She made apple prints using paint and an apple that was cut in half.

 

We also made an apple pie - here she is using scraps of pie crust dough to make "cookies" with an angel cookie cutter.

It is a tiny apple pie... I am trying to lose my extra baby weight still from this adorable little feather of a toddler:

 

Cecilia shows the finished pie... the top crust was made by cutting out the dough using an A shaped cookie cutter.

 

She made a collage of pictures beginning with A cut out from magazines.

 

She learned a bit about St. Anne and began learning letter formation by tracing poetry.

 

Her St. Anne illustration

 

More tracing - her angel poem

 

 

These biscuits made with angel-shaped cookie cutters are from a recipe that is actually called Angel Biscuits!  They have yeast in the dough, but they don't have to rise - but it makes them lighter and fluffier, like angels, I guess?  

 

 

A few other things Cecilia did this week... Assumption of Mary coloring (the solemnity of the Assumption was just this week, too!) and an apple tree craft/math activity using Do-a-Dots.

 

Cecilia also made an All About Me lapbook.

 

And finally, she colored her first virtue coloring sheet.  We will hang them around the room as a border and then compile them into a booklet at the end of the year.  Caroline is having fun remembering when she did these things... and complementing Cecilia about how she colors so well compared to when she was a Kindergartener, which is very sweet of her to say.

I doubt I will be able to keep up with posting each letter for Cecilia's Kindergarten year... but we are going to try to have as much fun with it as we can, and once I drop these last pesky 20ish pounds, maybe we can do more letter of the week cooking projects!

Kindergarten 2013 - What We're Doing

 This year we will embark on the Alphabet Path again!  Cecilia is so excited, because she has some memories of this when Caroline was in Kindergarten.  She is thrilled to be doing school and especially is excited about coloring and writing.

You can find past posts about the Alphabet Path under the label "alphabet path" to see what we did when Caroline was in K.  I am realizing there will be no way to get in all the crafts and baking projects we did then, along with doing 3rd grade and keeping up with my most active toddler yet!  But we will still try to do some fun stuff... this week, we managed to do apple prints with paint as well as work on parts of an "All About Me" lapbook.

Cecilia's week basically looks like this:
* Listening to and learning the Flower Fairy songs/poems
* Reading and memorizing poems from A Catholic Alphabet of Saints and God's Alphabet
* Listening to the stories from the Alphabet Path in which new saints, flowers, and letters are introduced by friendly fairies
* Coloring sheets for various saints, fairies, and other themes for each letter
* Copywork from the two poem books - tracing at first, moving on to actual handwriting at some point when she is ready.  She will also trace letters with her fingers on paper and in cornmeal and model them with playdough.
* ABC Virtues - one for each letter; coloring and binding into a book
* ABC Museum picture study - studying one painting for each letter and then Cecilia will draw her own version and compile them into a book
* Listening to various classic childhood picture books
* Listening to various picture books on science and nature themes (for instance, A is apples, B is birds, F is flowers...)
* French video once a week - Bonjour, les Amis
* Number Practice for Little Folks
* Catholic Children's Treasure Box books, read at tea time
* Whatever art projects and crafts we can fit in

We will also do Circle Time every day, which will include:
* Calendar work: saint of the day, date, days of week, months of year, liturgical color of the day
* Monthly prayer and hymn
* Reading about saint of the day
* Counting patterns with beanbags
* Beginning to learn about time and money (really basic right now, as she is still learning the names/values of each coin)
* Nursery Rhymes beginning with the letter of the week (she will also choose her favorite one for each letter and illustrate it in a book)
* Finger plays beginning with the letter of the week

Cecilia is not yet reading, as Caroline was going into Kindergarten, so I won't be having her reread the Alphabet Path stories aloud to me.  I will probably have her narrate them back to me after reading them each week.  I will also read to her from Devotional Stories for Little Folks, most likely... just have to figure out where to schedule that in...

I am planning to go make some pie crust in a few minutes so it will be ready for her to make an apple pie tomorrow... so, I'd better end this now and schedule it to post in the morning!  I love the gentle, fun, laid-back Kindergarten days and am glad to be able to go through the alphabet path again!

End of the Alphabet Path Party

...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!!

Z is for St. Zita and Zinnia Fairy!

Z was our final week of the Alphabet Path - and I am finally getting around to posting photos, which means next, I will be able to post photos of our End of the Alphabet Path Party!!!

Above are out themes from the week, all of which went into the word box, as usual.

Our Y poems for the week from An Alphabet of Catholic Saints and God's Alphabet.

~Foods for Z Week~

We had zucchini and eggplant Casserole and baked ziti (which was really penne - shhh, don't tell!;)

~Circle Time~

Songs and Rhymes

Zippety-do-da

Mama's Taking us to the Zoo Tomorrow

We also read a lot of different alphabet books, and we read books about the zoo this week. We considered going to the zoo... but the zoos are all so far away, and it was so hot this week!

~Letter Formation~

Playdough Z

writing Z's in cornmeal

Cut and Paste Z Collage

We continued doing Punch Out the Letter each week, but I didn't get photos of most of the letters towards the end of the alphabet!

~Flower Fairy for Letter Z: Zinnia~

Caroline's Zinnia flower fairy page from the Flower Fairies coloring book

~Saint for Letter X: St. Zita~

our painted St. Zita

Caroline does her St. Zita copywork

Finished X copywork from An Alphabet of Catholic Saints and illustration

~Picture Study: Z is for Zigzag~

Caroline drew her own version of Yatsuhashi (The Bridge of Eight Parts) in Mikawa by Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai. The bridge is certainly an example of a zigzag!

~ABC Virtue of the Week: Zeal~

My drawing for zeal shows a boy reading the Bible and having other various Catholic resources next to him on the bench, and he is thinking about how this is preparing him for his First Holy Communion. I decided that zeal is a hard virtue to illustrate, particularly for a child! I could have drawn a missionary, but that would have been an adult... so this was the best i could come up with!

I was asked if I could make these drawing available, so I have uploaded them to Google Docs. I also discovered that the originals which I had been using (and had run out at letter O) have actually been updated, and P-T can be found here. My drawings, P-Z (excluding X), can be found here:

P is for Patience

Q is for Quiet

R is for Respect

S is for Sharing

T is for Truthful

U is for Understanding

V is for Virtuous

W is for Worry Not

Y is for Yield

Z is for Zeal

And more on zeal...

Caroline's copywork from

God's Alphabet - the last poem in the book!

~Movement Activity~

Z is for zigzag!! I taped this pathway on the floor and the girls followed it by traveling in different ways and at different speeds.

Hope to post our end of the year party pictures soon! Also, we did make zucchini bread for our Z cooking project, and if I can find those photos I will add them later!