Travis is a pre-k grad, and although we intend to have lots of fun this summer, I also want him to avoid the “summer slide.” To keep him fresh, we’ll be working on the alphabet. This took me back to our journey through the alphabet when he was a toddler! But now the emphasis is different; he knows his letters and phonemes, but needs to work on the fine motor skills of tracing and writing.

After tracing the letter A, both upper and lower case, we designed one from a material that started with a – aluminum foil.

I showed Travis how to roll a sheet of foil into a coiled rope – fun!

We looked at the “a” in his workbook, and he thought hard about how to shape his foil. For the majority of it, we twisted one coil until it made a circle.

The second, shorter coil would be the line on the end. Travis has a habit of putting this line closer to the middle of the a’s bottom, but this “close reading” helped him pinpoint that it should go on the side.

Next we made an Artistic upper case A, using a favorite art medium: crayons.

I presented him with three crayons – two long and one short – and challenged him to decide which should go where.

After initially making what looked more like an H, he was quite proud when he tilted the two long crayons to make an A.

One down, 25 to go!