A is for ...

My youngest daughter will be five this month.  I'm not convinced that she is ready for kindergarten, but she started preschool at 3, homeschooled last year and we are going to see where we go this year.  She was a very shy child who came out gradually in preschool.  Last year when we began homeschooling, she always preferred play over school time.  With other events going on, I didn't push her.  This year, I want to see more social growing to make room for more book learning.  What we have chosen to do is a letter theme.  This is mainly review and the letter changes every two days.  We assembled a binder with a tab for each letter.  Each day's papers can be put into the binder for a sort of scrapbook to review.  Here are some of our slightly organized ideas for the letter A (of course we didn't do all of these and some are more specific than others):

• Food: Apples (taste testing and comparing, counting seeds, painting with apples, baking apple pie or cinnamon apples, expanding to the colors red and green); apricots (making jam, canning); avocados (making guacomole, the parts of a tree, germination)
• Animals: coloring pages of Alligators, Anteaters, Antelope, Aardvark, to name a few.
• Science: build an ant colony
• Geography: mark locations on a map, make a fact book about Arkansas, Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Australia, Algeria, Austria
• Math: counting seeds in an apple, counting ants
• Books: The Ants Go Marching One By One, The Apple Pie That Papa Baked by Lauren Thompson