The Stepanov Family: Our New Lessons and The Letter A

I was so excited to start new lessons with the kids! Cognitively they have had a growth explosion in the last couple of months; they sing and dance, they repeat every word they hear, they play games, they color and participate in crafts. Its been such a fun time to be a mother of triplets and I wanted my lesson to reflect all the fun we have. I derived the basic lesson plan from theletteroftheweek.com, but I use this sight for inspiration and make up own activities. The day before we started our new lessons (a week ago last Sunday), I got the playroom ready to be a classroom. I put two 2x2 foot ottoman tables together in the middle of the room for arts and crafts. We have a calendar on one wall for our calendar time and another wall we have our chalkboard which lists our lesson plan for the week.
This is how our lesson day goes:

- Morning Prayer: Lord I give you today. All I think, do, and say. All my work and all my play. This I give to you today. Amen

-Calendar Time and Weather: We sing two songs for calendar time, which you can find HERE. We then discuss the weather for that day'

-YouTube.com Video Lessons: This week, we started learning the letters of the alphabet, so most of our work revolves around that letter. Or course, we started with A. We watch four videos:

- Bible Lesson: We do this on YouTube, as well. We watch a video and then at night I read their Bible lesson story in their Bibles that I got for them for Christmas. This week we focused on the creation:

'The Creation of the World'

-Puppet Time: We make a puppet to go with a YouTube video. This week, we made an alligator paper bag puppet and an apple stick puppet (instructions below) and acted out this video:

'Alligator wants an Apple'

-Craft: I get these crafts off of Pinterest.

Letter A Alligators

Alien Handprints

-Music Appreciation: I don't follow the letter A here. This week we picked Beethoven and we just listened to Beethoven while we danced.

- Art Appreciation: American Gothic. For this, I just show them a picture and we briefly discuss it.

- Russian Lessons: We use more videos for this. If we have time, we'll watch Mickey Mouse Clubhouse in Russian (I couldn't believe it when we found this on YouTube).

'Russian Alphabet Song'

'Dino Lingo'

- Nature Study/Games: Our nature study this week was finding acorns. For games we had:

Acorn Dig- I hid acorns in their stand box and they dug for them

Advanced Peek a Boo- I would hide behind the furniture or around the corner and when they found me I would yell Peek-a-Boo!

Alligator Puppet:

-Color and cut out the alligator template below

-Attach to a paper bag as shown below