This week was Ee week in the Smith household. Elias liked it because his name starts with E. He kept saying, “I start with E!” I think Elias can definitely hear the sounds in words, but often he only talks about words we’ve used in our study rather than applying it to new words. But he’s only two after all. He seems to be most interested in talking about the letter B and words that start with buh. Almost every time I brought up the letter E this week he either referenced his name or wanted to talk about Bb.
Ee was a difficult letter for me to think of letter of the week activities so I had to break my trend and do both long and short E. I have been trying to only do one sound per week (only short a, only hard c, etc.), but I could not think of enough words for either long or short e, so I just did both.
Here were our Ee activities:
Saturday: E is for Egg
I got out our plastic Easter eggs so that Elias could play with them again. He loved opening and closing them, counting them, and putting them in and out of the basket. He tried putting them inside each other, and mixing colors. He had a blast, and wanted to play with them all week!
Sunday: E is for Eagle
Nathan’s adult coed slow pitch softball team is called the Screaming Eagles. I decided we would go cheer on the Eagles during their game. Unfortunately, it was raining so we didn’t get to go. I couldn’t justify taking a two year old and a three month old out into the rain just for an alphabet activity. Oh well.
Monday: E is for Elmo
I let Elias watch a little bit of Elmo’s world, and he colored some pages of his Elmo coloring book. We also talked about all of the Sesame street characters and what color they are. Elias said his favorite color is red like Elmo.
Tuesday: E is for Endangered
I read Elias some stories about Endangered animals. I tried to explain to him what endangered means, but I don’t think he really got it. We chose some of the animals that we read about, and searched for pictures of them on the internet. Then we printed them out and Elias colored them. He chose a tree frog, a manatee, a panther, and a gorilla.
Wednesday: E is for Elephant
We went to the zoo! Unfortunately, it was raining on this day as well, but I figured that we are in Oregon after all and we aren’t afraid of a little rain. Elias had a blast at the zoo. He knew we were going mostly to see the elephants, so every time I tried to stop at an animal on the way he just said he wanted to see the elephants first. After we had watched the elephants for a good long while, he named some other animals that he wanted to see. His favorites (besides the elephants) were the polar bears, the otters, and the leopards.
Lily playing with a ball!
Eiias watching the elephants
We witnessed an optical illusion while viewing the giraffes.
Thursday: E is for Elias
I couldn’t resist using Elias’ name for one of his words this week. I bought a canvas and let Elias choose some paint colors at the craft store. Then I used masking tape to spell his name on the canvas, and let him paint over it. When it dried, I took off the masking tape so that his name showed. The tape did not work as well as I had hoped. There are splotches of paint underneath where the tape was so the borders are not smooth. I will have to go over the borders in black or dark green paint before we hang it on his wall, but I think it will turn out pretty cute in the end. Elias certainly had fun painting it!
Friday: E is for Elijah
Our Bible story for the week was about Elijah. Lots of good stuff, and the stories are relatively new to Elias .