After a bit of holiday hiatus, we’re back with a new phoneme, this time not a letter pair but the soft C sound as in cinnamon. We focused on just a handful of words, with lots of enjoyable games and crafts in the process. I also put much more emphasis on reviewing flash cards of our theme words this time around. Travis isn’t reading yet, but he could sight read most of the words by the end of our unit, and is learning to sound out a word that’s placed in front of him. So without further ado…
Words of the Week:
- Circus: We kicked things off by staging a grand old circus of course! Stuffed animal friends walked a high wire act and did acrobatic flips into a ring.
Then we made two circus games, a mouse hole roll and a penny toss. 
It’s too bad the circus wasn’t in town, or we would have taken in a show as our field trip. As always, we love circuses that feature human performers, not animals. - Circle: You can tailor this word to your child’s age and ability. Little ones just learning their shapes will benefit from a hunt for circular items around the house. That idea is a bit old hat for Travis, so we turned it into a “pirate treasure hunt” for circles. When I phrased it that way, he raced around with glee!
My intention was to gather items we could put in a pile, but he spotted some I wouldn’t have thought of, including the knobs on the dresser and other circular furniture or decorations. 
Once we’d finished, he exuberantly asked for a triangle treasure hunt – why not? For fine motor skills, trace some of the circle objects you found.
- Cinderella: This was a new story for Travis, so we read a version of the fairy tale, and watched the movie as well. It was a fun opportunity to introduce Travis to a classic!
- Cymbals: We have a miniature drum set with a cymbal attached, and Travis loved learning to do rimshots and bashing out favorite songs.
We also scooped up a pair of tiny hand cymbals from the toy store, perfect for smashing together. Conveniently, the cymbals are circles too! - Cent: I always like when our alphabet or phoneme play brings us back to coins, since Travis learns more about the idea of money at each interval. To play with our cents, we cracked open his piggy bank and talked about the four denominations of cents in U.S. currency, and then sorted them out into pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters.
He then turned it into a game of store, telling me in cents how much each item cost. A great little math and currency lesson. - Centipede: It wasn’t the right time of year to seek out these little critters outside, but we read about their hundred (or 30, or 300) legs in several books, such as The Big Book of Bugs by Yuval Zommer and Usborne’s Beginners Non-Fiction Bugs book.
- Ceiling: What better way to remember to look up and pay attention to the ceiling than to adorn it with glow-in-the-dark constellations?
- Cereal: Don’t stop at just eating the stuff – we had a whole cereal-themed afternoon one cold day! First, we tested out magnetic cereal. The instructions in the game said we’d need a cereal with a high iron content (100% RDA or more). This concept sounded completely bizarre since our cereals from the health food store tend to be about 4 to 10% daily iron. Well sure enough, cereal from the regular grocery store went as high as 100% iron, so I thought it would be fun to show Travis the difference.
Unfortunately the game didn’t work for us: even using our strongest magnet wand, the high iron cereal didn’t budge! 
I would be very curious what cereal the online testers had used. Ah well, leftover cereal made for a great sensory bin. 
Then we used the boxes for cereal race tracks and recycled jet packs.
- City: We started off building a city with skyscrapers from Travis’s blocks.
Later we decided that our city needed a parking lot for all the cars – which turned into a letter match parking lot activity that was a huge hit. 
If you’re able, follow up with a field trip to a real city, whichever is closest to you!
Glued-on googly eyes complete your little frog. Then have fun feeding your frog plastic insects or spiders. 
Tongs make the game great for fine motor skills.
We marked a lily pad wherever one landed, and then used a ruler to see how many inches each frog had jumped. Travis had so much fun that he was busy drawing lily pads and tossing frogs long after the activity was officially “over.”
…as well as some in their rehabilitation room. Spotting tadpoles helped reinforce what we’d learn in our science of the week about the frog life cycle. Meanwhile, we soaked up plenty of FResh air while we were there.
browsing a farmers market;
blowing bubbles;
taking an inch hike (look for things that are one inch or less, surprisingly harder than you’d think!);
having a shaving cream throw-down (free if you steal Daddy’s canister);
and a picnic in a park.
You can also play a good old-fashioned game of 
Then we made 
We added blue for water and brown for sand for a beachy scene!
We also traced a 
Or hermit crabs in SHells.
Although recommended for ages 4 and up, Travis had no trouble at all with a little guidance, and was thrilled with each creation! Then it was time to craft a 
We finished with a real pirate ship adventure – thank you summer vacation!
Dad’s boots are so fun!
Make a slit in the egg with scissors, and your tot gets to help the chick hatch!
Half the fun turned out to be ripping up those roads and loading the tape into our garbage and dump trucks! 
Then our trucks went to the mechanic shop (i.e. our tool bench), and even 
To continue the fun, we made 
He loved watching me perform simple tricks, like self-attaching paper clips. 
Travis also loves playing with old sets of keys around the house, using them to manipulate all our real locks. Good thing mama knows how to reverse the damage!
Then go on a brick hunt around town – brick houses, brick walkways. Travis loved yelling out “Brick!” as we drove around and spotted the material. 
What a perfect coincidence that our local children’s museum had a brick laying pattern activity.
If you’re able to pipe on orange frosting beaks, yours will look even more like chicks! Then I put together pipe cleaner chicks for him to hop around; wind a pipe cleaner around your fingers, then glue on googly eyes, a triangle beak, and little feet from orange construction paper.
Then we made 
Other simple activities would be to set off on a rock hunt, and perhaps turn a few into pet rocks once home with pom poms and googly eyes.
This turned out to be a happy coincidence as the suggested guiding word from 
Then we made a 
Finally, we built a sandpaper sandcastle, an activity 
It was neat to do this now, with Travis much more in charge of where each piece of his sandcastle went on the paper!
We continued the fun at home by making 
Then snuggle up and talk about how there can be a bond between two people as well!
We also read 
Could we also scatter tissue paper across a tabletop with our breath? 
Then head outside and hold up tissue paper into the wind – Travis loved the way it twisted and turned! 
For a neat art project, drip a little liquid watercolor onto a piece of paper. Blow through a straw to scatter the watercolor into gorgeous patterns.
We tried to make 
To finish our focus on the word, we made a 
You can also make a stop sign with the word writ large for your child, and set up a town with cars and roads.
Supervise closely, as you’ll likely need to stand your child on a bathroom counter for this. Then we experimented by 
We also toyed around with variations on the word “sticky” by pulling out an old favorite game – a collage of random craft materials on sticky contact paper.
Phonics Book of the Week: 
First things first, Travis traced O and W on his 
Once we had a huge pile of flower pictures, we used a glue stick to craft a gorgeous “Flower Show” on green construction paper. Travis loved deciding where each picture should go, and was very into mixing colors and big flower/small flowers!
In addition to our phonics title, we read the silly book Click Clack Moo: Cows that Type by Doreen Cronin. If you’re lucky, you might even see a plOW while you visit the cows!
You can also emphasize the word this week as you drive around town!
joyful parenting 