A is for Alligator

I've made up my mind and I've set a goal. I am going to start preschool with my son at home this year. We are currently just gonna go through the alphabet and have fun learning how to write our letters. My son knows most of the alphabet, but writing it is a different story, so that's gonna be our goal for this year. Writing and knowing the sounds of the alphabet. It's not gonna be overly complicated - I just want him to enjoy learning and it's nice to give him something to do that is fun and educational. I've heard that it's best to start with the easier letters, like "i" and "l" but my brain just couldn't handle that. Gotta start at the beginning!! So, we did A. Thanks to this awesome blog, I was able to find this great idea for an "A" craft.

A is for alligator. There are a number of crafts for the letter "A" that are linked above, but this was the one that I had the easiest access to the supplies.

On top of doing this with my 3 year old, I had the pleasure of watching a friend's kids for a bit and they got to join in on the crafting fun.

We started out by cutting out the printed pieces. My son had a little trouble cutting, but he did a little bit of it. I wanted him to try to do it on his own. His friend, Ryan, (who's a year older), enjoyed doing the cutting for a while and did much better at cutting than my boy. You'll never guess which kid is mine...oh wait - as always, he's the nekked one.

I cut out the paper for Miss Cailin - who is 2 years old and super duper adorable. Once all the cutting was done (I'm pretty sure I did 3/4 of it for the boys as well), we went on to gluing on the scaly skin. Cailin got to help smear the glue on the paper. That may have been her favorite part. You can't tell from the picture, but her paper was pretty much colored purple from the glue stick. :0)

The boys also got to apply the glue themselves and then they got to work with the green construction paper: applying it to the glued areas.

At this point, I stopped taking pictures. Cailin was pretty much done and the boys were wanting assistance to get the pieces to be glued in the right spots. But, much fun was had by all. I tried my darndest to get a picture of all of them with their alligators.

But, it was quite the challenge. 

Did they learn anything about the letter "A"? It's kinda doubtful. Maybe they did. Kids retain far more than we realize. But, either way, they had a good time and they all three knew that it started as the letter "A".

I will be trying to work on at least one letter per week with Cade, and I'm super excited about it. (By the way, we did do some tracing and things like that too, but this was the fun part that we did with friends, so I thought I'd share.) And, my apologies to my son (in the future) if I could get you to wear clothes, I'd have far more modest pictures of you. :)