C for Cooper

 I recently started working with Cooper to help him learn the alphabet. A few months ago I emailed my friend Kendra who is a reading recovery teacher for some ideas and advice on where to start and things to do. She gave me some great information and where to begin. She told me it's best to teach the letters of their name first. So I would try to make sure to point out letters where we saw them and we worked on spelling his name out loud (which was hilarious to listen to by the way). 

While skyping with my sister-in-law and nephew she shared with us that they had just started doing letter of the week. I thought it sounded like a great idea! She shared with me what they were doing and basically a lesson plan for us to go by for our first week. For those of you who don't know Aimee my sister-in-law, first of all you're missing out because she is wonderful (I could go on and on about her) but secondly she is a teacher by trade. From her emails of ideas of things to do, eat, places to go, and people to see or call I can tell she is some kind of a teacher and I know her students were blessed to have her. She's been such a help and inspiration for this project! Check out her new blog where she is giving detailed steps and info on how to do what she's doing @ TeachLoveGrow . 

So to start off our week of C's I drew a big C on the dry erase board, then hid post it notes around the house so Coop could find them and drew a big C on paper and let him color, glue cotton balls on, and stick car stickers on. These were fun and easy to do. Then came the hide and seek bag. It had cows, caterpillar, car, C's, and a cotton ball hidden in veggie curly noodles for color. He enjoyed this activity but also enjoyed the noodles or doodles as he calls them. We also kept our things on the blanket like Aimee did the towel for Trip. This made for easier clean up. However Coop got lucky and got to dump the bag too. I had to change the gift bag to a short brown bag because his arms were too short to dig in. 

We also made cloud dough. Such and easy thing to do but what a fun substance to play with. All it takes is flour and baby oil and you have a silky dough to mush, ball up, crumble and simply make a mess with!

Coop got to "cook" with mommy. Yes I know baking muffins isn't cooking but it was something easy for him to help with and he enjoyed it. 

We went shopping for Cfood, not to be confused with seafood! We found fun things like crackers, cookies and carrots. He had cucumbers from the garden also. We tried to have a Cfood at lunch everyday.

We talked about and prayed for people who's names start with C. Such as Aunt Courtney and Callie and Coby. 

He also enjoyed playing follow the leader and doing C motions and movements : crawl, clap, crouch, crash, act crazy. Speaking of crazy you may notice Coop's crazy hair in his coloring photos so we also counted that as a C word for the day! 

We had cashew chicken to end our C week. All in all it was a good week and gave us something to do and we are already having fun with O and he's caught on to what the letter is already.

I hope I didn't bore you with all the details. I won't tell you as much for O week but I wanted to give you an idea of what we had going on.
Next week P week maybe a little busy because Gram, PawPaw and GiGi will be here from Florida. Hope they are ready for some P fun!

Hope you're having a great week. Go do something fun and messy and tell us all about it!

Bonus picture:
Coop sat down to play in the sun the was shining on the kitchen floor. I thought it was cute so wanted to share.