Letter Aa - Ants!

This week our focus is on the letter Aa for ANTS! Several weeks ago I ordered E his first magazine: Zootles. You may be more familiar with the magazine Zoobooks. Zootles is the same, just for younger readers. We got his first magazine in the mail and the theme was ants! So, I am sure that's where E got the idea to learn about ants this week.

I picked up a packets of critters at the Dollar Tree. The ant inside was a good model for us to use.

The first thing we did was make this Ant chart. E told me what to write. I like these because they give me an idea of what he already knows about a topic. 

We started off completing a simple Aa is for Ant puzzle. We talked about ants in an ant hill and how we have some down the road from our house. Ick!

We then worked on tracing the letter A. I laminated the paper and we used a dry erase marker so we can use it over and over. E said, "The little a is kind of like an o. But, you put the line down and that makes it an a"! 

We used this this ant chart that labels the parts of an ant and we used our ant model to identify parts as well. Although he couldn't remember the words "thorax" and "abdomen", he was able to point to the right part when I said the words.

We organized ants in different sizes. I liked that this chart used the word medium. E did really well with it.

We helped the ants go to their ant hills by tracing the lines to show their paths. On the last page, the dashed lines were a bit harder. After E finished, E said they could just go a different way and he drew his own lines from the ant to the ant hill. I got so tickled at the way his mind works - like, why make it hard...just let them go like this!

We talked briefly about the life cycle of an ant. I felt like it was over his head so I explained it pretty basic. Just an interesting tidbit to throw in there for him! 

Lastly, we read a page about of his Zootles magazine and learned that male ants can fly. Who knew?!

More fun letter Aa - ants activities coming later this week!