Letters X, Y and Z Week!

We have come to the end of the Little Learner's 1-2 year old curriculum!  Can you believe my first post from this curriculum was in January??  I have had such a blast teaching my little love, Grace.  She has improved dramatically in many areas like:

-speaking skills (this curriculum is big on talking WITH your learner as you go through the process...explaining directions, asking questions and sometimes just letting them talk!)
-processing information
-applying what she has learned
-following directions
-listening!
-memory: she has learned so much at such a young age and can remember a crazy amount of information!

Honestly, no matter how much you do there are some kids that don't like to do "school" or learn what you think they should learn.  I am all about catering to the needs and individual interests of kids.  However, children also need to learn to sit in a spot and to listen so I feel like this curriculum wraps all of that up into one.  I am blessed to have a daughter that loves to learn about pretty much anything.  So, for the last time (for this curriculum's sake) I am posting about our week!

I am not a scrapbooker and got tired of printing off pictures AND buying the albums to put them in.  My solution: make photo books by Picaboo.  I bought a living social deal where you spend $30 and get $100 worth!  It was totally worth it.  This was our family album from April 2012-2013.  The theme is the ABCs of course :)  Each letter in the alphabet and book stands for something that we did during Grace's second year of life.

Since we are on X, Y, and Z week here is a peek at those letters.  Is it bad that we were in the emergency room after she had her x-rays and it hit me, "Well at least we have something for the letter X for our family picture book now..."  I don't think Jimmy was entertained :)  Hate that she got hurt but glad we have pictures and can show her one day!

This was how I kept track of her growth for the year.

I had to show you a peek at the letter "F" because we love our friends and family!  There were SOOO many pictures from the year but I really liked including everyone on TWO pages instead of who knows how many with a different kind of photo album.

"X" is for X-ray (Grace's x-ray from her broken arm!); "Y" is for yarn (glued a piece of yarn on the page); and "Z" is for zebra (we made a zebra out of white and black construction pieces).

"X" is for xylophone!  I found this cute snack idea on Pinterest.  They are rainbow flavored Twizzlers.  Grace has a toy xylophone that we played with as well.

"Y" is for yarn lengths.  We made different lengths and talked about putting them in order from shortest to longest. 

Then Grace wanted to dance with the yarn :)

*We didn't do the "Y" snack yet but you can do a "yummy" or "yucky" food experiment and have your learner try different foods.

"Z" is for zebra stripe painting!

Here is what we started with: paint, a cookie sheet, black construction paper and a bag of $1 marbles.

*If marbles make you nervous you can use golf balls.

We started by just rolling around the marbles on the sheet.

Then I put the paint on the paper and let Grace roll the marbles around.  

Obviously I put too much paint on this first one.  The one above with some yellow worked better because the marbles didn't all stick to the globs of paint I put on this one.  Either way, it turned out cute!

This would be a cute "Z" snack but I chose not to buy the whole pack for one snack.

I recently found these in my teacher stash :)  Mommy score!  Grace does well with memorizing (just like her mommy) so I figured we would go ahead and start with some basic sight words in preparation for reading.  CALM DOWN if you think I am trying to teach my two year old to read...I'm not!  I'm getting her ready...and that doesn't just happen over night.  We read to her plenty and I want her to LOVE reading like she currently does, forever.