Ariana's Alphabet--D (a new feature!)

Life with a 2 year old is crazy, fun, exciting, hilarious and maddening all at the same time. The other day she brought me some alphabet soup for lunch, using her fridge letter magnets! Oh the creative things that girl comes up with on her own!

If we were still stationed in Omaha I would already have her enrolled in the private church preschool that was literally 2 blocks down from our house. We would walk there in the mornings and I would pick her up before lunch, or whatever our little routine would be. Sadly it's not the case. There is no preschool on base, and the only other option is put her in a in home daycare or send her to a German preschool. Well, I can't imagine sending her off into a foreign school. None of the kids or teachers would speak English all day, can you even imagine how alone she would feel? Nope, not happening.

So the best option I could come up with is to provide her with more directed learning activities. Give her more of a focused teaching environment. Play with more of a learning twist. We've always done lots of fun activities together but this gave me, and her, more structure and makes me be able to focus more on spending time teaching without being overwhelmed.

Here's my goal, a letter a week. That would give us 26 weeks of activities. Something that involves that letter each day. This week I choose letter D because I saw our neighbors had new baby ducks. I basically jumped right in! I've decided to call it Ariana's Alphabet and once a week I'll probably share what letter and fun things we did that week.

D is for ducks. Not only did we played with her bath ducks, but we colored duck pictures, read duck books, and went to see the baby ducks in our village.

D is for Dora and Diego. We watched them on TV and colored pictures of them.

D is for Dinosaurs. We played outside with little plastic dinosaurs I found in the party favor section.

D is for Dress up. We danced around the living room to some Beatles and also played Dress up.

D is for Daddy and Dentist. We also read a book called my Daddy is an Airman, and also made Daddy ring the Doorbell (Ding-Dong) when he came home from work, and talked about the Dentist! Daddy actually did go to the Dentist this week!

Our week of D things went well and she quickly picked up on the letter and sound and started pointing the letter out to me in random places! A preschool teacher I know, used to tell me that it doesn't do the kids any good to just be able to recite the alphabet song. They need to know the letters, the sounds, etc. So, this is my plan! Jumping around the alphabet each week!

I'm preparing for next week! I even have a fun craft for us to do! Some of the letters are obviously more difficult than others, I mean X? Come on! That may be a short week. Should be fun though and I already feel more creative in thinking of different activities we can do each week instead of the same thing over and over!

xo's

Cat