Introducing the Letters and Sounds of the Alphabet / God's Little Explorers

Our four year old daughter's last day of preschool was Monday!  I can hardly believe how fast her first year went and I am beyond thankful that she has a second year of PreK because I am not ready to send her to Kindergarten:)  We celebrated the last day of school by going to the movies to see Monsters University!  It was sooo cute!  It was her very first movie theater experience.

I am very excited about starting the God's Little Explorers Preschool Curriculum!  I have not printed out all of the pages yet, but plan to do so and have it spiral bound at Staples like many other folks have done.  It is an A to Z adventure of God's word.  I actually LOVE the fact that the alphabet is not presented in order.  The curriculum begins with letter "Xx" and the theme is God's Word is a Treasure.  So a pirate/explorer theme works great!  The first day I explained to our daughter that we were going to be looking for treasure together and showed her the treasure map I created.

Then we talked about how God's Word ~ the Bible ~ is a treasure map to help us find our way.  Next, we read the Treasure Hunt story in the The Jesus Storybook Bible which is the parable from Matthew 13 about hidden treasure.  On page 255 it states so perfectly that "God's treasure was his children.  It was why Jesus had come into the world.  To find God;s treasure."  Isn't that a perfect picture for little ones?  What better way to make this treasure hunt concrete than to dig for our own treasure!?!  I hid some craft jewels in a bin of corn and she had to dig for her treasure.  We also sorted them by shape and size and then picked out all of the hearts for a special project. 

I explained to her that when people hide treasure they make a map so they can remember where they put it. They use an "X" to mark the spot where their treasure is hidden.  God wants our hearts and he has an "X" to mark the spot of His greatest treasure ~ OUR HEARTS!  We glued the hearts gems to an "X" and I mounted it to a page with the quote from her Storybook Bible.

Speaking of the Letter X ~ I think it is so cool that we started with that letter!  There is not a whole lot out there for poor letter X...everything is xylophone or x-ray, but HEY, you gotta work with what you have:)  Here is what we did for X:

My focus for our daughter is on letter identification and sounds right now.  I am not overly concerned with her writing...especially since she is getting Occupational Therapy at school to address this area.  I do not want her to hate writing, so at home I try to not push her too hard in that area.  Notice I said TRY...it is really hard as a teacher not to constantly attempt to correct her grip, etc.  You can see from the pictures that we do a lot of Do-a-Dot, dot stickers, highlighting, cutting and pasting, as well as stickers.  By the way ~ the book Jessica's X-Ray is really cute and includes real x-rays of various body parts.  She really enjoyed it!  

I also talked with her about the words hunt, quest, and pursuit since many games utilize these words in the to refer to the same/similar concept.  Of course, we did a ton of scavenger hunts this week!  We did the treasure hunt in the corn that I mentioned earlier, we did an outdoor neighborhood nature hunt, and we played the game Puppy Pursuit by Melissa and Doug.  This is an awesome game for preschoolers that really targets several skills at once while having fun:)  Click on the picture to read about it on Amazon.

I really want to wrap up letter x and move on to the next week.  We had two days when we were not able to work on our plans, so we got a few days behind.  Letter A is sure to be fun!  I had a Caramel Apple Party at the beginning of this school year and have a TON of apple things for us to explore. 

If you are also doing God's Little Explorers and have a blog, please let me know.  I would love to follow your experience!