W lessons with Winnie the Pooh and Watermelons

Well we may or may not be finished with the letter W.  I have a few more ideas, one of which ties into a book we are reading.  It would be a shock to have only spent one week on a letter, so most probably we will continue it for another week.  Here is what we have done so far.
Our words for our word card pictures on the poster this week are: web, wagon, wolf, walrus, watermelon and wombat.
The girls got to use their watercolors from their new art tote for the first time.  They watercolored a picture of Winnie the Pooh that I printed out.

Then they traced a letter W and colored the paper.

Later that day I allowed them to watch Winnie the Pooh (the original movie).

Seeing the movie on the shelf was what made me think of having them color a picture of Winnie the Pooh.  As usual Tabitha was the one glued to the TV, Amelia isn't usually stuck in front of the TV, she will wander around mostly.

For their W letter/sound books they each made a watermelon slice.  I cut out white paper in a wedge shape and red paper in a slightly smaller wedge shape (using the first as a pattern).  The girls glued the white paper onto the book page and then glued the pink to the white.  They glued seeds on

and then traced the dots I had made at the bottom in green.

Then we played a file folder game I designed and created.  Here is the storyline of the game:
Rabbit (from Winnie the Pooh) went to the market to buy watermelon seeds to plant in his garden.  On the way home the seeds were falling out of a hole in the sack without Rabbit noticing.  Winnie the Pooh is following the path (by walking of course) to pick up as many seeds as he can to return them to Rabbit.  We were supposed to use a die, but I couldn't find one.  So I grabbed the spinner out of our Chutes and Ladders game. On each player's turn the spinner is spun and the player moves the designated number of spaces.  The player then either takes the seeds from the pile if landing on a number space, loses a certain amount of seeds if landing on a minus space, loses all seeds if landing on the "Oh Bother" space, or loses a turn if landing on the "Hunny" pot space (because we all know Winnie the Pooh will not pass up an opportunity to help himself to a smackarel of honey).

The game set up

Everyone but Amelia ended up on the -2 space

Steven helped me by coloring the pictures I printed out.

Unrelated to the letter W:
Amelia is having lots of fun lately by cutting fringes in paper with my rippled scissors.

Tabitha is on a roll when it comes to sounding out 3 letter, and some longer, phonetic words.  I knew she learned about vowels being "sticky" letters that hold the words together from the Talking Words Factory DVD.  So the other day I typed out one word at a time and had her tell me which letter was the sticky letter.  It took a bit, but she seems to be getting it.  One of the words I tried was stuck.  After she told me the vowel and sounded out the word, I typed stick and she shocked me by sounding it out.

Then I wrote sentences one word at a time.  She had trouble with that and Piglet, but everything else she sounded out.  I explained what the period was and told her she had read a sentence!

Then I typed out a whole list of words and we took turns pointing to them and sounding them out.  Once again, one of those spur of the moment activities that has gone over better than anything I planned.

She loved pointing at the words!

I made quite the find at the thrift shop today:

Seemed perfect seeing what she has been accomplishing.

The other day I heard her singing a song from the Talking Words Factory DVD.  She was spelling cat and hat:

She wrote cat first (the one on the right), then hat (over to the left), then later added the other letters.  All with no prompting whatsoever on my part.

And I am so thrilled to realize that Amelia knows more colors than I thought.  We have some of those baby keys on a ring, each one is a different color.  I held them up one at a time and she was able to name: blue, green, red and purple.

I am linking this post up with the Schoolhouse Review Crew's Toys and Games For Homeschool Round Up.



To see what others are doing with their toddlers and preschoolers head on over to 1+1+1=1 and Homeschool Creations.