Letter Bb

 Week 2 begins with letter Bb. I decide that I also need to teach N how to hold a pencil properly. We sing a song, "My thumb is bent, pointer points to the tip, tall man uses his side, I tuck the last two fingers in and take em for a ride!" He resists all week, but after a week and a half is starting to do it more naturally.

 Holding the pencil better, makes his writing sooo much better. His left (non-writing) hand is also placed as a support on the table.  He takes the direction to "circle" the B's much better this week.  I have pretty much given up on trying to sit down and teach E. I occasionally say, "Look Elijah, a B!" or something like that.  He just can't focus yet. I know he's little and they all learn at their own speed, but it can be a bit discouraging nonetheless.

 N totally circles the B's at the bottom. I learn that giving little stars next to a really good one is a huge encouragement to him.  I make a big deal about a well written B and say "Oh man! That needs a star!! It is soooo good!!"

 We practice a ton of worksheets that have to do with letter tracing.

I introduce N to his first crossword.

 We glue beans onto our letter B.

 We make bumble bees, Each piece is colored and I cut out. They use glue sticks to place down. Still not grasping all the steps of the glue stick.

 We have several pictures to color related to our LOTW (letter of the week). We hang all of our projects on the cork board by our school spot so we can look at them all week and I can remind them that I am proud of their great efforts.

 We work on a few worksheets. We look for Beavers. We color big B's one color and little b's another. I have to help with these as we are working on coloring in the lines and N was getting "over" school at this point.  I decide each week I will now keep doing school when we wake up each morning until we can't focus any longer, then maybe do some more later in the day if we aren't busy.  It's something that fills our time and creates productive activities rather than being wild all day long.  School isn't so much about learning at this point for me...although N is really picking up on a lot.

 We did a lot of B words throughout our week again. I made a list of a lot of them and we talked about it for a while. We kept making the "buh" sound and we started to learn the zoophonics song "Allie the Alligator says AH AH, Bubba the Bear says BUH BUH, ..."

 We also made a B letter book. Each page had a B word and I let N practice his cutting on these squares that we colored, cut and glued on each page.