With the current summer solstice, it was only fitting that S would be for SUN. (What I’m attempting to do is make ALuv’s science or social studies curriculum revolve around the same theme, so he also learned about the sun. I’ll include some of the things he did towards the end of this post.)
S Play-doh mat from Homeschool Creations. I first roll out the play-doh, place it on the mat, and he mashes it down.
Road letter mats. Both of my boys LOVED this; although it does use a lot of ink to print! I modeled for NJoy how to “drive” his car in the correct direction to form the letter and then he did it several times. I marked where to start driving with a green line and where to stop with a red line. You can also click here for other activities you can do with these cool road mats.
These next few S activities came from Erica at Confessions of a Homeschooler. She also has other S activities on this page. We didn’t do nearly all of them!
S Tracing: I was amazed at how well he did this. The lower case s was harder for him, but that’s to be expected.
S Do-a-Dot: He did two of these, as you can see in the above picture.
S Letter Hunt: He thought playing with the dice was the coolest part.
S is for Stamps: I love how Erica has ideas for what kids can put on each letter of the alphabet. I could have also used stickers, but he chose stamps this time. The boy loves to play with his stamps!
I didn’t use my sound tubs this go ’round because most of the objects are s-blends and NJoy can’t pronounce those, yet. For example, he says snake like NAKE and stool is a TOOL. So, for my S purposes, the s-blends would not work. He sorted the s pictures from the back of Words Their Way that I had colored and laminated. I purposely chose pictures without blends; such as sock, scissors, seal, sun, sailboat, and six. He also wanted to sort the S pictures with the B pictures, but he wasn’t quite ready to do this independently; so he had a lot of help from mama.
NJoy got his first taste of cutting with scissors. Carissa posted about these scissors and they worked great for NJoy. He was so excited to use them. I also bought this Kumon scissor practice book, but he’s not quite ready for it, yet. Maybe in a couple months. For his first cutting practice, he just cut around the outside edge of a piece of paper and smiled from ear to ear the entire time!
Played with suns and stars made out of felt (I made a red, white, blue, and yellow stars for ALuv, as we talked about the temperature and color of different stars.) I didn’t have a pattern for these…I just cut a pentagon for the middle and 5 triangles for the tips. For the sun, I cut a yellow circle for the middle and 6 orange triangles out of felt.
Made sun catchers
First, the boys put pieces of cut up tissue paper onto clear contact paper. Then, we laid another piece of contact paper on top to seal in all the yellow tissue paper.
I cut out 2 circles with orange construction paper and they drew the sun’s “rays” on both pieces.
Glue was added to both pieces of orange construction paper
and they were pasted together; with the contact paper in between. We hole-punched the tops, added a string and hung them in a window. They look so cute and they DO shine like little suns!
Read books about the sun (These were mostly read alouds for ALuv; although NJoy did like looking at the pictures and talking about them.)
In this picture are:
- The Reasons for the Seasons by Gail Gibbons
- The Sun: Star of the Solar System by Lincoln James
- The Sun by Elaine Landau
Sun Writing
After reading The Sun: Star of the Solar System, ALuv picked out something he had learned from the book that he wanted to illustrate and write.
He drew his picture first and then wrote: The sun’s flames shoot into outr space. Most of the words he wanted to use were on the page in the book, so I encouraged him to use it as a resource. When he got to into, he said he didn’t know how to spell it. But I quickly reminded him that he knows in and to; so he combined them & spelled into! We then added into to our word wall.
There are SO many FREE and amazing resources online and at the library! And when you can take those and mix in a little bit of creativity, it’s just downright FUN!
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