Jump into day 2 of our week all about apples and the letter A!
BOOK OF THE DAY AND STEAM ACTIVITY
Tractor Mac Harvest Time by Billy Steers
The Tractor Mac book collection is one of our favorites. The illustrations are beautiful and double as an I Spy game thanks to all the detail. The stories themselves are sweet and simple enough for my 3 year old Lane to follow along with. Bonus! There’s a kitty character named Pepper, the same name as my dearest childhood cat.
For our STEAM activity we pulled out the playdough. My son was particularly fond of this part. We used red, yellow and green since we had decided in our previous lesson that these were the colors of our apples. I taught him how to roll bits of playdough into little balls, or apple shapes as we called them. While I was teaching him to use both of his hands, my husband later showed him how he could use a table top to roll it around. See! I’m learning new teaching techniques too. I made cubes and triangles to test his knowledge of shapes and he was on top of his game. He then proceeded to smash them. I’m noticing a pattern of knocking over things and squishing here.
Supplies Needed:
- red, yellow, green playdough
- brown pipe cleaners or twigs for an apple stem
SING-A-LONG
Let’s Count Up To Ten by KidsTV123
After a quick snack break, we moved onto our song of the day. Song time is definitely a well liked part of our lesson. Lane is very drawn to music and the colorful YouTube videos are fun to watch. This particular song counted up from 1 and then down from 10, it also introduces the number 0.
HANDS ON LEARNING AND WORKSHEET
I really enjoyed hands on learning as a kid so I figured my son would take to it, and so far he has. For this lesson, I prepared 3 construction paper apple trees pretty quickly. One for each of our apple colors (red, yellow, green). Then I grabbed 10 of each color bead, coordinating them to our apple trees. All the little beads were placed in a bowl and I asked my son to sort the beads. He took each bead individually and placed them onto the correct color tree. This was a good test for fine motor development that also incorporated some color recognition. While it didn’t seem like the most fun activity to me, Lane was way more focused than I expected and beamed with pride when he finished the task. He then counted the beads from each color group. Just like our last class day, we focused on pointing to each bead and counting up by 1. This has already improved his ability to actually count objects, rather than just reciting the numbers in numerical order.
Next we tried tracing lines for the first time. Lane hasn’t exemplified the greatest artistic abilities so far in his 3 short years, but he makes up for it with his impressive knowledge of heavy equipment. I drew up a simple tracing pattern worksheet that included some apples to go along with our weekly focus and capital and lowercase letter A’s. Click on the “Letter A Line Tracing” link above for a free printable worksheet. This is a task we will continue weekly as my son learns to hold a crayon more comfortably and exert more control. I’m excited to watch him improve!
Supplies Needed:
- red, yellow, green, brown construction paper
- scissors
- glue
- red, yellow, green craft beads
- small bowl
CRAFT CORNER
Our final project of the day included a good introduction to safety with hot glue guns. Lane pulled crayons from our stash in colors that he recognized from our apples and colored a leaf, stem and apple core onto white paper. I helped to hold the popsicle sticks in place while he colored them red. Then we carefully glued each piece together to create a letter A that resembled an apple. A simple and satisfying project that doubled as a toy.
Supplies Needed:
- crayons
- white paper
- 3 popsicle sticks
- hot glue gun + glue
Ember + Pine 