Before Five In A Row

I'm SO excited about this I can hardly stand it!  I know William is young, and Abby even younger, but I do want to do something with them that's a bit more than just playing.  That said, I do realize that young children learn so much simply by playing and pretending so I don't want to cut into that precious time.  However, I don't think that 30 minutes or so each day of something a tad more "structured" isn't going to hurt, either.  With that said, after a lot of research, I've come across something I think will fit with our kids - Five In A Row.  FIAR starts with age five, but Before Five In A Row (B4FIAR) is suitable for children between ages 2-4.  PERFECT!  Abby will be two in July and William will be four in September. 

I ordered the manual and a few of the books and my order came in last week. 

The idea is that you "row" a book for five days, each day reading the book and then talking about various topics/ideas in the book, doing a craft/art project that corresponds, cooking food that goes along with it, learning about a country/state that is mentioned in the book, talking about character qualities brought up, etc.

I will be using Homeschool Share for activities and lapbooks.  All last week I printed out the activities that go along with the books that I purchased, and filed them.  That way I'm all prepped and ready to go!

We also finished William's ABC book last week.  That was quite the undertaking, but I'm so glad we did it!  He now knows all his letters (capital and small) and the sounds they make.  We'll be working more with this during the summer as well, and more specifically, using The Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading and The Blue Backed Speller.  He has such a desire to learn...the problem isn't convincing him to sit "five more minutes" but, "you need to go outside and play now...no more school!"  I love it!  

Here is the finished book!  He's quite proud of it, and loves to peruse the pages, saying the letters and sounds.

I cut out every letter, upper and lower case, and together we came up with a picture to represent the sound it makes.  (For the vowels we stayed with the short sound.)

Olive Owl and Pee Wee Penguin

 Isn't there some sort of machine that makes these letters FOR you?  I'm cringing at the thought of doing this with any more kids!

Xylophone and Yancy Yak.  He had no idea what a xylophone was, so I found several neat YouTube videos and we watched a couple of those.

The work for me was time consuming, but I think William had a lot of fun with it, and learned a lot!

I'm hoping to blog about our reading adventures with B4FIAR, so stay tuned!