Remember the Letter R

Maybe it’s because I’m pregnant, but I could not think of one verse that began with the letter “R” except “Rejoice in the Lord always” and honestly, I wasn’t sure if that was a verse or a song! So, I pulled out my handy dandy concordance and began to flip through the R’s. Wow. Concordances are…well, detailed.

Finally, I got to the word “remember” and I liked this idea. I want Lydia to REMEMBER the things of the Lord. While comparing the concordance to the NIRV on biblegateway.com, I found one of my favorite verses (and probably one of the first I ever memorized) Proverbs 3:6, “In all your ways REMEMBER Him. Then He will make your path smooth and straight.”

(Now that I look at it and we’ve said it a few hundred times, I should have split this up and done the first sentence this week and the second sentence next week for “S”: smooth and straight. Live and learn.)

I know “remember” is kind of a hard concept, even though we do talk about remembering a lot. So, I taught Lydia the sign for remember to kind of help emphasize the word and the verse. (You can see the sign here.) I think this helped and she’s very intent to do the sign while we say the verse…or while I say the verse.

(We’ve done sign language with Lydia since she was months old. She knows well over a hundred signs. So, she’s used to this. But regardless, I think motions/signs help emphasize any learning. The more senses you can use, the more you’ll remember.)

There are so many great r words: roses, rainbow, round/rectangle, red…and ROBOT. Ever since Lydia saw Wall-E (or Waaaaalllleeee, as she says it), she’s been really into robots. We decided to make a red, rectangle robot with ribbon appendages. We pulled out the ever-present baby name book and decided on “Razi” as a first name. What can I say? She liked it.

By the way, Lydia did the whole thing by herself with the exception of the ribbon and the awesome button and light drawings I did on Razi’s chest. Did you see the great eyes and nose she did? That’s a big improvement—there are actually TWO separate eyes! Oh, and the “scribbling” on the top left? Lydia wrote “Razi the Robot”, of course.

I was going to go through our books for “R” but Lydia already thought of a book because it has a RAINBOW in it…our Little Golden Book of Noah’s Ark. It’s actually quite good–follows the story well and has cute pictures. We’ll do more with Noah and the rainbow this week because I think it’s a great tie in to “remember”—God put the rainbow in the sky so we could REMEMBER His promise to us.

Let’s start at the very beginning…

Hiya, everyone!  I’m Leigh – thanks, Amanda, for the wonderful intro!  I would’ve posted some before now about my prep for this week, but today got here before I was ready! 

My son, EJ, is a couple weeks younger than Amanda’s beautiful daughter.  I wasn’t ready to start him earlier with any kind of “structured” learning (not that I would call what I’m doing “structured” in any way – anyone with a 2 year old knows that any structure you plan typically flies right out the window) due to our arrival of baby #2.  Well, now that said baby is 8 months old, I finally felt ready to get going.  Finally.

As Amanda said, I was really excited to peek in on what she was doing with Lydia.  I wasn’t ready for a full-on homeschool preschool curriculum – the ones I saw online kind of intimidated me.  I wanted to pick and pull from things that I liked.  And I’m sure I’ll be changing things as I go – I already learned some things about EJ’s learning style from our time this morning.

So we started with the letter “A” today…  And I chose the verse “And God is able to shower all kinds of blessings on you.” 2 Corinthians 9:8, to concentrate on this week.  I wish the word “glue” started with the letter A.  That was the biggest hit of the morning.

I copied the verse onto a piece of construction paper, and I printed out some clip art for “A” words.  We had an apple, an ant, an astronaut, an acorn, and an airplane.  All of them are some of EJ’s favorite things – especially the ant and the astronaut.  I cut them out and EJ went wild with the glue.  My idea was to kind of have the A word things “shower” down under the verse, and we’ll keep talking about the verse all this week.

I used Amanda’s idea for the alphabet worksheet from First School.  I love that site! 

Crayons would not do to color in the letter A.  Once he had the glue in his hand, he would not let go.  So we covered all the letters on the page with torn pieces of red paper (red for apples).  He even covered the smaller letters and the writing on the side of the sheet.  He didn’t want to hold the paper up for me to get a picture of him with it, so this is what I got…

We talked about the letter A all morning.  EJ’s known his letters by sight for a while, so I had him point out A’s on signs to me as we went to the dentist (which has no A’s in it.  Except I got to say “AAAAHHHH” really big for the dentist this morning, so that was fun.)  We saw automobiles and an ambulance, and we “Ah-Choo’d” over and over (that was hilarious!).  He got to see Uncle Andrew and Aunt Jessie, and have apple juice for lunch.  He also told Poppy (my dad) all about his letter A words over the phone.  I got to sing “The Ants Go Marching” 5 times back to back on the way home, too.  I’m glad I looked up all the verses online before today – I couldn’t remember past “The ants go marching 4 by 4…” on my own.

So what I learned is that I cannot force EJ to do anything.  I already knew this in every other area of his life – I don’t know why I thought this would be any different.  I didn’t really try to force anything on him, but I pushed the verse too hard.  We’ll have to come back to that later today, and hopefully he’s decided it’s OK to listen to me say it over and over again.  Does anyone have any other suggestions about how to help a child learn a verse? 

I am excited about the rest of the week.  We have a full week already planned, so squeezing in just a couple more Athings will be about all we can do.  But EJ is really getting into the A sounds and words that start with the letter A… and he’s already talking about B words and sounds, and even S words and sounds!  So he’s picking up on this fast.  I hope I can keep up!

Quite Possibly the World’s Most Perfect Q

We’re to Q. Q. What kind of letter is Q? It can’t even work on it’s own, it’s got to have a little “u” next to it. How random is that? Who made that rule up? It’s very strange to me much less a 2 year old.

I was a little stuck on a Q verse. The only one I could think of was “Quench not the Spirit.” 1 Thessalonians 5:19. King Jimmy anyone?  So, I emailed my bbb* (and one faithful commenter), Leigh. She got concordance- happy and sent me a great list of Q verses.

We chose:

“I am quick to obey your commands…” Psalm 119:32

That is definitely something I want my daughter, Lydia to be. Quick to obey. That’s one reason I named her Lydia because the Lydia in the Bible was quick to believe and do for God. However, when I explained that “quick” meant “fast”, she said, “Mommy, I don’t like fast.” Oh, well.

After a little starfall, and reading the verse, we decided to make a queen.. A beautiful, royal queen. I wanted it to just be her face with a little tinfoil crown. I mean, everyone has tinfoil in their cupboard, right?

WRONG!

So, on to Plan B. I looked through my wrapping paper until I found some silver ribbons. I found some pretty purple tissue paper with scalloped edges and voila, our queen:

OK, so Lydia put her lips on upside down. And she doesn’t have any limbs. And as Lydia pointed out, no chin, either. But still, she looks regal. Right?

I’m looking forward to this letter because I really want to tell Lydia the story of Queen Esther. One of my favorite kids’ Bibles, The Super Hero Bible is illustrated by Brother Jones Artwork. And their picture of Queen Esther is the best I’ve ever seen. I know she’ll love it when she sees it. Sorry I can’t show it to you… (FYI: I just went on amazon to link to it and it says it is OUT OF PRINT. If you ever find one at your bookstore, buy it. It’s way cool.)

Anyway, I think we’re also going to watch Veggie Tale’s Queen Esther. Even though it may be a little confusing when Lydia doesn’t even know the story to watch it with vegetables, but whatever. And of course, I’ve already promised Lydia we’ll be making Queen crowns. I found some really cute ones online yesterday. I’ll share them with you soon, I promise!

Oh, and keep your feed readers open, I’ve got a special announcement coming up ASAP!

*best blogging buddy

The Letter “O”

So, I thought I’d let the pictures do the talking today…

This week we chose Psalm 30:2 “O Lord my God, I called to you for help and you healed me.” I thought there would be more “O God…” type verses. But they were all something like, “O God, slay my enemies” or something like that.

Anyway, after reading the verse and writing it, Lydia colored in all the O’s. I think she did a pretty good job.

I printed off some orange clip art…

Found some orange stickers…

And some random orange fun foam and buttons and other stuff…

Then let Lydia decorate a letter O.

Then we used our “O” worksheet from First School. Lydia loved all the animals on the bottom: ostrich, ox, otter and octopus.

She even tried her hand at tracing the letters. Not bad for a two year old, I guess…

And the finished products with her saying, “Ooooooh.”

Happy “O” Day!