XYZ

After beginning our journey into various "letter of the week" activities nearly a year and a half ago, the boys and I FINALLY made it through the alphabet! We slowed down quite a bit with our letter learning once preK began since the boys simply wanted to free-play on their days off from school. Over the last few months, though, we squeezed in time to complete activities for our last letters-- XYZ. I didn't think we'd be able to come up with many exciting new things for these letters, but they ended up being quite fun! 

Letter X

I had never taught Cody and Jaden how to play tic-tac-toe before, so Letter X week seemed like the perfect time to learn!

The boys didn't really grasp the concept of how to play defensively and only looked at completing their own rows. Jaden was content to play only a couple games, but Cody played quite a few just with me and then asked to play again another day later in the week.

For our tactile letter book page, Cody and Jaden glued on rectangles to make the X look like a xylophone.

Making these xylophones was a good intro to our xylophone song-writing activity. I gave Cody and Jaden each a paper with 10 small blank circles. Then, I asked them to fill in the circles with colors from our xylophone to make a song.

Right away after finishing their coloring, the boys wanted to try out their new songs.

Cody titled his piece, "Jesus Loves the Little Lamb."

Jaden called his song, "Cow, Cow, Will You Feed Me Now, Now, Now?"

Here are two brief videos of each boy playing his song. They were quite proud of these pieces! I thought it was cute that they each wanted to sing along.

 Next, we went on an X scavenger hunt around the house. The boys could use any two objects to create a letter X.

By the end, some of their X's were looking a bit obscure. :)

Finally, we did a few activity sheets that Cody and Jaden seemed to enjoy. For the first page, the boys had to cross out (with an X) the object that didn't belong in each row. They thought it was so amusing to find the random object: "Why would an animal go with all these vehicles??"

The next page was an intro to subtraction in which the boys had to cross out a certain number of objects and determine how many were left over. I love their focused expressions. :)

I didn't even realize Jaden felt so comfortable writing his numbers. He's learned a LOT in preK this year.

Letter Y

Most of these activities we did way back in December, so you'll notice some Christmas decorations around the house in the pictures below. :) First for the letter Y, the boys filled up their tactile letter page with pieces of yarn. I was originally planning to give Cody and Jaden some scissor practice by having them cut their own yarn pieces. Unfortunately, their kiddie scissors were fairly useless when it came to yarn cutting, so I just did this step for them.

Next, we did a measurement activity with yarn. For each boy, I cut 3 yarn pieces in various lengths-- 1 inch, 1 foot, and 1 yard. .

 We talked about the names of each of these units, and then I asked the boys to find objects in the house that would measure approximately 1 inch, 1 foot, or one yard.

At first, the boys recorded some of their findings on this chart, but then they eventually enjoyed just running around the house and finding items. I loved how the activity encouraged them to continually use these measuring terms.

Our next Y activity was easily the boys' favorite. I'll have to remember this activity to repeat another time. We did a yarn maze! While the boys were upstairs, I wound a skein of yarn over, under, around, and through all kinds of objects in our living room, kitchen and dining room.

Jaden and Cody were thrilled to come downstairs and see yarn stretched all throughout our home! I told them where to begin and said they need to follow the yarn from start to finish.

At some intersections, it was a little tricky to follow the yarn's path.

The boys giggled and giggled while climbing over and under the furniture and ended up repeating the whole maze at least a couple more times. Definitely worth my time to set this up!

Who knew there were so many fun activities out there to do with yarn?! Our next project was yarn painting. After dipping a piece of yarn in their chosen color, the boys "painted" the paper with their yarn.

Technically, they were supposed to only paint one side of the folded sheet of paper so that we could make a mirror image painting, but this direction wasn't really followed. :)

The folded paintings still turned out fairly neat, though! The boys were pleased with their pictures.

"Original Yarn Artwork" by Cody and Jaden Schleicher :)

This last Y activity we did was my personal favorite-- likely because I remember doing weaving projects when I was little. Both boys quickly grasped the concept of weaving the ribbon "over, then under" through the yarn. 

They were both very focused!

Jaden decided to make a pattern in his weaving project. He was also very concerned with spacing his ribbons out evenly.

Cody was my fast worker. He seemed to get the hang of weaving pretty quickly.

Both weaving projects turned out nicely!

Letter Z

We all loved this first letter Z project-- fiZZZing science! (Yes, so we have to stretch a bit to relate it to letter Z.) I started by filling small cups with various liquids-- water, OJ, vinegar, lemon juice, milk, vanilla extract, and oil. I colored the clear liquids with food coloring to make it a little more interesting. We then filled up a pan with baking soda.

After predicting whether or not the liquid would fizz in the baking soda, the boys chose one liquid at a time to squeeze into the tray.

We had a bit of a spill with one of the liquids, hence the outfit change for Cody. :) The boys were so excited to see the fizzing reaction.

When we were done testing each liquid, Jaden and Cody simply wanted to play with the rest of the baking soda. They asked for more vinegar and lemon juice so they could see more reactions. Our tray was a smelly (yet colorful) mess by the end.

We used zig zag ribbon on our tactile Z letter page.

Our final Z activity came from teachingmomma.org. It was a creative play zoo activity. So fun! I gave Jaden and Cody this zoo check-up form and then encouraged them to dress up as a zookeeper/vet.

I figured Jaden and Cody would put on their doctor costumes, but they instead went the route of wizard and superhero for some reason. :) 

After selecting which animals would go in their cages (shoeboxes),

the boys gave the animals some food. Cody nearly made me laugh out loud when he said (while feeding the flamingo), "I couldn't find any shrimp for you, so you'll have to eat these bananas." Ha!

The boys also gave the animals "drinks" of water....

.... and then scrubbed them clean with washcloths.

The final step was to check each animal's health.

Jaden decided that he needed gloves on so he would get bitten.

What a fun idea! This zoo play-activity was one that we could leave out for a couple days and let the boys return to at their leisure. They didn't play with it for a really long time at any one sitting, but they loved coming back to it several times over the course of a few days.

And that wraps up our letter activities! I have loved this form of learning with Jaden and Cody. I really appreciate the wide variety of new skills and experiences they've been exposed to and the way it's given me some direction in researching some new activities for them. Also, it was fun to have the boys read through their tactile letter books and notice how far they've come in their letter writing over the last year. We are proud of our little letter learners! :)