The currency of Grace is where my song begins...

Big A, Little A, What Begins With A?

Week one we began with the Letter A.

(before you read this you might want to read the Intro post. Also please know while you read that our boys are normal boys. It is sometimes fun and dreamy to think of things you want to do w/ your kiddos but the reality is some things flop...but somethings totally turn out fantastic and totally worth the effort. You will never know what they love if you dont try! hope this helps someone get there wheels turning!)

Our Memory Verse was " A gentle answer turns away anger, but a harsh word stirs up wrath" Proverbs 15:1 (because we were having some issues with the boys tones towards each other and towards us we thought this was only fitting :) We were going to use "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" Romans 3:23 but Titus already knew it and I was on this blog I found via Pinterest looking for 'A' activities and the mom was using this verse for 'A' and I thought it was great for our situation!

We are covering God's faithfulness (like I mentioned briefly in the Intro post) and with each week we are saying, "God is faithful. We can be ______" this things will not correspond with the letter of the week but will go along with stories we are reading / hope to read. We started this with "God is faithful. We can be courageous" We have a book of children's stories about virtue and one entire section is on courage and perseverance. So we read those to the boys this week. We talked about all kinds of ways God has been faithful to us and others we know. We read many Bible stories about men being courageous because they knew God was faithful.

For Titus' school he followed most all of his curriculum (which I plan to list out w/ links some day ) and it seems to be a good fit so far.

Here are some of the things we did with Justus::

I made shape flash cards. He loves them. We can hide them around the house. We can carry them around and match them with objects around the house, etc. Or just use them as flash cards. If they get torn...no biggy, I made them on a whim w/ a 3X5 card and a marker!

I mentioned in the Intro post that I had picked up some of these from the dollar bin at Target. They are fun and age appropriate. He is not as skilled w/ his pencil but he is catching on.
We did "A is for Apple" (found on this site) I just drew apples w/ a marker on a piece of printer paper and he glued tissue paper pieces on each one as I told him the color to use. This helped with motor skills (gluing/placing) and worked on his colors along with the obvious A sound.
This was another Pinterest find. (here is a fun link for letter projects) All the letters can become animals! A is for Alligator. This was a definite favorite for Justus!
A friend of mine made 5 sets of alphabet coloring sheets with just a maker and some printer paper. We paint them, marker them, color them, cut them...easy, quick and fun.
I found a super cheap set of wood stamps of all the letters at Jo-Ann Fabic on Teacher weekend. We have TONS of ink pads so this was another cheap activity that Justus LOVED. He seriously loved this. He did so many sheets just like this of A.
I found a set of the Letters that teachers use for their bulletin boards for a dollar or two and thought they would come in handy. They were a lot of fun. you can do all kinds of things with them!
I think that's about it for A. Hope this helps someone get their brain going for your home! Remember for the littles, they will only last about 10 mins on any given project so dont spend much time getting it ready just throw it together and they will love it!