"A" is for Abbey

I like the idea of "rowing" a book with my preschooler. I also like the idea of studying a letter a week. So I've decided to combine the two into one lapbook - rowing a book and studying a letter a week. The concept of "rowing" is from Five in Row. You read a book five days in a row with your child(ren) and do an activity each day. For preschool, the reading and activities are shorter and don't require all five days.

Now the book I chose to start with is not part of their book list, but we haven't gathered all the books and I wanted to get started right away. I chose a book that we already had and created my own activities for it, but I will also be doing the books from Before Five in a Row.

Our "A" book selection this week was:

Day 1:

I read the book aloud to Bode. The pictures are lovely. The book was short enough to keep his attention, yet the characters had enough varied activity to keep it interesting. The activities Bode did were coloring the character cutouts that I cut out ahead of time (which I found online by searching through Google pictures). Other than a little help with the cat's eyes, Bode did the rest. (We later added sticks to make them into puppets.) Bode also did an alphabet page for the letter "A" (worksheet from Enchanted Learning.)

Day 2:

We read the book together. Since we were short on time, I only had Bode do one activity. In the book the characters have sweet dreams, so I had Bode dictate to me his favorite dream(s). He likes dreams about having fun and stopping volcanoes. That's a boy for you :)

Day 3:

We read the book together again. Bode likes going over the characters' names, and today he remembered the frog's name is Euripides (which I thought was pretty impressive). We talked about the instruments they used in the book and Bode started tracing the names (violin, tamborine, trumpet, drum). He made rainbow upper and lower case "Aa"s by tracing them with different colors, to practice his penmanship. He cut and pasted pictures of objects that start with an "A" (worksheet from Homeschool Creations.) He also colored a picture of a tea cup to celebrate tea time.

Day 4:

We read the book again, of course. Bode finished tracing the musical instrument names and wrote "music." Bode dictated a "knock knock" joke to me. He completed a word match page of letter "A" words (worksheet from Enchanted Learning.) Then he traced and wrote on his own, upper case and lower case letter "A" (worksheets from Homeschool Creations.) After I put it together we reviewed the lapbook. Bode kept saying "Wow" so I guess he liked it and liked seeing all the work he did.

Finished Product:

This was the first lapbook I've done with Bode, so I kept finding myself at the computer seeing if there was anything else I wanted to add for him to do for it. But it was fun and kept his attention. He loved the book and never got tired of reading it. Somedays he liked writing more than others, but because we only worked on it for short periods of time, it wasn't that big of a deal. I decided to separate the book activites from the letter activites in the lapbook. This lapbook will be fun for us to review throughout the year.

I've also linked up to Preschool Corner. If you're looking for more preschool ideas, just follow the link: