Letter C Preschool Unit

OVERVIEW

We covered a variety of things for one week of Letter C doing The Peaceful Preschool curriculum and some other activities. Caps For Sale was probably the most impressionable and memorable: what a fantastic story!

C IS FOR CAMPING

We also spent an entire week on C is for Camping — you can view that entire unit on a separate post (COMING SOON)

BIBLE FOCUS

The Peaceful Preschool memory verse used “children” for letter C, so I went with that for our Bible focus. We also had Thoughts to Make Your Heart Sing from the library this week to peruse and I found a fitting page in there.

“God says ‘I love you – Just Because!'” We read several stories in which Jesus interacted with children. There’s several good ones from The Jesus Storybook Bible — “How to pray” (featured in the photo), “The friend of little children”, and stories from our other children’s Bibles as well: Jesus heals Jairus’ daughter, and Jesus feeds the five thousand (the young boy supplies the bread and fish).

You can view more details about our A-Z Bible focus on this page.

BOOKS

*Books from The Peaceful Preschool curriculum

We also enjoyed the audiobooks for Caps For Sale and Corduroy!

LEARNING ACTIVITIES

Note that some things we do I don’t capture in a photo, like most of our letter formation activities: glitter glue letters (or sandpaper letters), write & wipe chalkboard, write & wipe dry erase, and salt tray.

	Reading and acting out Caps For Sale! I painted a peddler peg doll and used wood craft buttons for “caps” in order to reenact the story and for a fine motor skill + counting + color sorting activity.
	Acting out Caps For Sale Part 2: use a Barrel of Monkeys to hang some crazy monkeys on a tree just like the story (great for fine motor skills, counting, & story reenactment). So fun!! I stuck sticks in some play dough in the barrel so the sticks wouldn’t move.
	Forming letter C with play dough and our wood “caps” — I like the added effect of not just forming the letter out of play dough but one-by-one adding some small item to it (could be bottle caps or beads or coins).
	Caps for Sale story reenactment with the hats: obviously we did this!
	Coin sorting & counting tray: “Fifty cents a cap!”. When I did this with the kids the first time we counted out 50 cents in different ways and pretended to sell each other some caps (see above). I also took the time to name each coin for them while we sorted, which never occurred to me to do before for some reason. I left this on our learning shelf all week.
	Corduroy button sorting (large, medium, small). My son (preschooler) wanted nothing to do with this but my 2 year old did it. I sat with her the first time and named each size over and over. Then I let her try it alone. It’s great for sorting decision-making but also fine motor skills.
	We did some embroidery hoop hand sewing today to pretended to be the little girl in Corduroy. I don’t have any giant plastic buttons so I just let them hand-stitch freely to their heart’s content while we listened to the audio of the Corduroy story.
	C is for Caps, Corduroy, and Clothing! . . . These are my DIY Montessori Dressing Frames. I just took old soon-to-be-given-away or beyond-hope clothing of my kids, placed an embroidery hoop around the part I wanted, and then cut up the clothing around it. There’s velcro, a zipper, snaps, buttons (small ones from a shirt and big ones from a jacket), a buckle, and a shoelace. I will say that while my 2 year old loves these & they keep her occupied for awhile, my 3 year old has very little interest. He also can be quite resistant to getting dressed independently anyway. My 2 year old, on the other hand, can be heard yelling “I want to do it all by myself!” all day.
	C is for Clothing: Each kid has one drawer with clothing labels (I made these labels with photos of their actual clothing). The idea is that their clothing is 100% accessible to them and that they have limited choices. I keep the excess and off-season stuff up higher in the dresser or in a closet. We also worked on clothes sorting & matching with our actual clothes and printed cards. Lastly, we also did a sock pairing matching: I literally just threw every sock they have in a bin and asked them to find all the pairs. Extra enticement for learning & playing with clothes: run them through the dryer for a few minutes so they are warm & cozy!
	“She gives me cream with all her might…” (The Cow by Robert Louis Stevenson). We read this poem and then made whipped cream (recipe via The Peaceful Preschool) by shaking a jar filled with cream & a couple of marbles for some (intense) large motor skills, practical life skills, and for a yummy treat!
	“She walks along the meadow grass / and eats the meadow flowers” (The Cow by Robert Louis Stevenson). We picked some flowers today and the kids arranged them in a vase together. We left out a couple for them to pick the petals apart, count the petals, and to compare sizes & colors.
	We picked some clover in our yard to form in to a C
	Chicka Chicka Boom Boom & movable alphabet fun! I made a simple coconut tree out of construction paper. What a great book for just some open-ended alphabet exploration (and identifying upper and lower case letters).
	For letter review this week I took all our Letter A, B, and C 3-Part cards together and had my son separate them in to separate caps.
	C is for Cherry Chocolate Cupcakes! There are SO MANY Letter C sweet treats to choose from: chocolate cupcakes, chocolate cake, chocolate chip cookies, coconut cookies, carrot cake, etc. BUT … we got ABC Dream from the library this week and on the C page there’s a cherry chocolate cupcake and my first thought was: “Well that’s the best idea EVER!” … So, we made chocolate cupcakes with cherry flavored frosting. The kids helped in the kitchen and ate more frosting than was necessary. If you’re interested, I typed the recipe out & it’s in PDF form here.
	Counting some cats & cupcakes after reading If You Give A Cat A Cupcake This is not from The Peaceful Preschool curriculum, but I couldn’t pass up doing this book & some cat-related. I’ve had these Charley Harper cat stickers since Christmas and finally found a good use for them! Basically for this I presented a bowl of cats and bowl of cupcakes and then asked them to count out ____ cats and ____ cupcakes, and then had them count the total number of cats and cupcakes. When we were finished my 2 year old got her own version of a fine motor skill activity: she peeled all the cupcake stickers off the wood craft coins for me!
	C is for Cat craft from Simply Learning. I printed the cat C on to color cardstock (their choice), and then they put glue on the C and placed color pom poms around it. I added the cutout ears to make a cat! This ended up being a joint endeavor because my son lost interest after about half the C — then little sister came along to happily finish!
	C is for Cat’s Colors Color sorting items I have: these peg dolls, wood craft acorns, 1.5″ wood craft coins, tree branch discs (I cut these from a sassafras branch with a coping saw), and cards that I made with the name of each color (our color sorting tray has 12 colors).
	C is for Chalk. We made chalk paint with the beat-up leftovers of our existing chalk pile since we got a brand new box of chalk this week. We color sorted all the pieces & then we poured each set in a separate plastic bag. I let both kids hammer it to oblivion with their toy wood hammers (I helped with a legit hammer). Then, we added the crushed pieces back into the bowls, added water, and voilà: chalk paint!
	Just a reminder that I use the Jolly Phonics Actions for going through letter sounds for each letter. For example: ck: raise hands and snap fingers as if playing castanets saying ck, ck, ck ch: move arms at sides as if you are a train, saying ch, ch, ch (Obviously Letter C also sometimes makes the “s” sounds but we didn’t have any objects or cards to go with that for this example) You can also find videos on YouTube of kids doing the sounds & actions!