Pre-Literacy
As with A, we talked about what big and little B look like and the sound the letter makes. Owen practiced writing the letter on paper and in his dry-erase notebook.
Owen decorated big B with puff balls, and for little B, I drew a beehive on white paper and let Owen color it yellow (he only wanted to color part of it). Then, he made yellow thumbprints all over the paper. Once they dried, I transformed the thumbprints into bees.
There are a lot of great B books. Some of the books we read were:
Knuffle Bunny by Mo Willems
Bear Wants More by Karma Wilson
King Bidgood's in the Bathtub by Audrey and Don Wood
Blueberries for Sal by Robert McCloskey
Where Is Bear? by Leslea Newman
Books we WOULD have read if we were in the U.S. include:
Bark, George by Jules Feiffer
Beautiful Bananas by Elizabeth Laird
Rhyming Dust Bunnies by Jan Thomas
Ginger Bear by Mini Grey
Arts and Crafts
Inspired by Laura, we painted in different shades of blue (Owen wasn't too interested; he had a lot more fun once I opened up the other colors to him!).
We made this bat puppet, originally found on DLTK-Kids.com.
We made butterflies by "footpainting" the wings. At first, Owen wasn't keen on me painting his foot, but once he saw me do it for myself he was all for it. (Source: Project Balancing Act)
Cooking
There's all sorts of great foods to make that start with B. We made banana bread, blueberry muffins, and blueberry pancakes.
Fun and Games
--We played a family classic--Beanie Baby Basketball--where we threw beanie babies into a bin (thanks, Grandma S., for all the Beanie Babies!). We also played Beanie Baby Hide-and-Seek, where we hide beanie babies all over a room and then the other person finds them.
--We played animal and numbers Bingo games, made for us by Grandma S.
Music
Some of the songs in our music times included The Wheels on the Bus, Baby Bumblebee, and the nursery rhyme Baa Baa Black Sheep (next time around, I want to make felt pieces for this rhyme so we can do some counting activities with it).
Physical Activities/Outings
We saw the bird show at the zoo and went for a bike ride.
Science and Nature/Numbers and Math
We did a bean bag toss with the number bean (actually rice) bags I made thanks to this site. I would say the number and Owen had to locate it and toss it into the bin (as you can see, penguin and panda bear wanted to watch).
We also tried playing "Before," where I would say a number and Owen would try to think of the number than comes right before it. It helped when I wrote out the numbers in order for him as a cheat sheet.
Other
Some of the items Owen located in our treasure hunt were: balls, bananas, bathing suit, bus, boots, blocks, brush, and bread (see more in the I Spy picture below). The treat at the end of the hunt was Gummi Bears.
