I am going to write about this stuff so I don’t forget about it for Maddie, so if you aren’t interested in preschool ideas, read no further!

I have decided to go through the alphabet and teach Charlie a letter a week along with scripture to go with that letter.  We have had great success so far.  It has been really amazing to me what a 3 year old can remember!  This had also been a huge learning experience for me because teaching a 3 year old is so much different than teaching the high schoolers that I taught in my past life.

I think Charlie has squirted out 3 bottles of Elmer’s Glue at this point!  Good thing glue is pretty cheap!

A

We started, of course, with the letter A.  I found this great video of Elmo celebrating the letter, which Charlie absolutely loved: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BR-Zs_2518

This website has coloring pages for every letter of the alphabet: http://www.dltk-teach.com/alphabuddies/maposter.html

Charlie particularly liked coloring the amublance page, since he is really into anything with loud sirens and flashing lights right now!

We also did the Ape and Apple pages.  I can’t remember what else we did with the letter A.  I know that I was getting ready for VBS at the time we did this unit so we made some airplanes.  He spent an entire afternoon flying a simple paper airplane around the house.  Then Jason came home and spent the rest of the evening making and flying paper airplanes!

We didn’t memorize a Bible verse that week because Charlie was in Vacation Bible School at my mom’s church every night that week and then at VBS at our church all day that Saturday.  It just so happened that the themes at both churces was “Amazing Aviation: Awesome God, Awesome Power.”  I figured that was enough A’s for one week!

B

For the letter B, Charlie memorized Acts 16:31, “Believe in Jesus, and you will be saved.”  So far, I have gotten verse suggestions from http://impressyourkids.org/alphabet-scripture-verses-a-to-z/.  This is an AWESOME cite!

We also studied bees (of course).  We used paint, a paper plate, and yarn to make a bee from the letter B:

Education.com has great printables for each letter.  I particularly liked this one because it had pictures of lots of things that Charlie likes that begin with the letter B.  He liked scribbling all over this page!

The direct link to this page is http://www.education.com/slideshow/letters-of-the-alphabet/coloring-learn-letter-b/.

Charlie and Maddie (okay, me, too) loved “The Butterfly Ballad.”  I found it at http://www.superteacherworksheets.com/pz-butterfly-ballad.html.

http://www.dltk-teach.com/alphabuddies/simple-b.htm has letter B templates that you can print out and color.  They actually have templates for every letter of the alphabet.

It was really simple to incorporate lessons about God’s creativity and power into these lessons.  I mean, isn’t the life of a bee and butterfly really amazing, especially when looked at through the eyes of a 3 year old?  God is so awesome.

C

We had lots of fun with the letter C, since Charlie’s name begins with C!  Our scripture for this week was “Children, obey your parents” Eph. 6:1.  What an important thing for both my children and for me to remember!!!

The first thing we did with this lesson was to make a caterpillar.  I simply drew circles in the shape of a C, added antennae and feet, and that was it!  Charlie used his dot markers to make a dot in each circle.  I got this idea from Pinterest bit it wouldn’t go back to the original site, so this is just the picture from Pinterest:

We made a big piece of artwork for the letter C to hang in Charlie’s room.  This idea came from http://attackofthetwins.blogspot.com/2011_08_01_archive.html.  I just outlined the letter C with masking tape on a piece of canvas, then let Charlie go to town!  When he had covered the entire canvas I pulled off the tape and we had an original work of art!

Charlie and Maddie both made smaller versions of this craft which I hung in the laundry room.  I added hooks under each one so they would have a place to hang their stuff.

One morning when Charlie was begging to glue something, I realized that Cheerios starts with C!  Charlie spent the morning with a box of cereal and a bottle of glue.  This is our second attempt.  The first ended up as a Cheerio and glue volcano!

After looking at this picture, I realize that we need to switch to a lower-sugar cereal!