L is for LadyBug (Part 1)

This past week we officially started homeschooling my youngest son Turtle, age 3. He has been observing me homeschool his older brother and enjoys doing art with us. We have done some things such toddler activities and preschool science with him. I felt it was time for him to begin Homeschool Preschool or "TOT school" at home four days a week for now.

Rather than start at the beginning with the alphabet letters in order, I am going by the order of simple letters to recognize first and so on. I am using HWT (Handwriting without Tears) with my oldest son with printing and I will be using the Kumon workbook on Uppercase Letters with my toddler over the summer. I figured I could have the boys do some shared crafts and activities.

Our letter of the week is the Letter L and the related theme is a Ladybug theme.

Our first day we made a Letter L.
Painted it with leaf prints and glued leaves. We practiced finger tracing the letter L with shaving cream while my oldest son worked on his Letter L collage and writing the Letter L.

We read the book "My L Sound Box" by Jane Belk Moncure. After reading the book, we looked around the home to find and collect objects that begin with the letter L.
Some things we found were:
toy Lion
lemon
Lollipop
toy lamb
Leaf
Letters
ladybug cut out

My oldest drew lines and made a road that my youngest could practice driving his hot wheels cras on. So we made it a game of trying to keep our cars in between the lines of the road. (It helps with motor skills). Both boys enjoying playing together. Art and Crafts and Center time are some areas besides shared Reading and science, that I can have them do together at times.

Our second day, my toddler worked on ABCs, Ladybug Counting and decorated his own Paper plate Ladybug for our Ladybug theme. For our ABCs We did upper case letter matching with printables from Making Learning Fun. For Art and Crafts, I purchased some multicolored dot stickers and let my toddler remove and place the stickers in his Lady bug. It helps develop fine motor skills.He colored his ladybug coloring sheets and we played Ladybug counting with printables from Homeshool Share. To access the PDF file you have to register but registration is free! Here's my toddler decorating his Ladybug with multicolored stickers.

For the Letter L, we made a Line collages with pieces of yarn. The boys were not too much interested in doing it, so we opted to make Lollipops with tongue depressors, poster board, glue and yarn as shown below.

On day three, we had fun playing a Lady Toss game that I made. I cut out the middle portion of some 7 inch red paper plates, added black dot stickers (I colored the multicolored stickers black with a sharpie marker) with the Ladybug's spots. Then added three dot stickers on top as the head, and taped black pipe cleaners for the antennae.

I used my paper towel holder with a dowel as the base for a Flower. I taped green leaves out of foam sheets and cut a small section for the stem that is taped around the bottom of the dowel. I painted a sunflower and made a small hole so it would fit through the dowel.


Now to play our Ladybug Toss game. I made six toss Lady bug rings (three for each player). The object of game is to toss your Ladybug so she/he can "fly" and land on the flower. My toddler loved playing the game as you can see from the photos! Both boys loved playing the game. Everyone who played was a winner and got a prize. Their own bug stamps (which we can use next week for our Part 2 of Letter L week)

As you can see from the photos, he enjoyed playing with his Ladybug Toss game. I am so glad I thought of making this game. I am surprised no one thought of it first.

Day four we made ladybugs with moveable wings. We got the idea from Danielle's Place. Click here for instructions and a printable ladybug outline and other Ladybug crafts.We were unable to get our books in time that we placed on hold at the library, so we are continuing our L is for Lady bug week (Part 2) next week with Book Activities from "The Grouchy Lady bug" by Eric Carle and more fun ideas.

Stayed tune for next weekend for my post on "L is for Ladybug" week Part 2..!