Letter Of The Week o

Olive o

I like to eat almost every fruit and vegetable but ewwww not olives! I do think it’s fun to make them out of paper and paint though.  When I asked my son what we could do for the letter of the week this week he suggested Owl, we’d finally left the house after being sick and went to the zoo this morning where he declared the Owls to be his favorite animal. I reminded him we’d already made an owl so we settled on olive instead. What I like is that even though this is supposed to be a lowercase project  the O looks more like an uppercase one – but the red pimento looks like a lowercase so it’s both!

1. Gather your materials. You will need 2 pieces of construction paper, some green, brown and red paint, 2 paint brushes, scissors, a marker and glue.
2. Start by writing an two o’s on your paper, a large and small one.  I didn’t write and inner circle because I wanted my son to paint all over it, and if there are more lines he isn’t usually as inclined to paint as much.
3. Mix some brown and green paint together and paint the large O.
4. Get a fresh brush and red paint.
5. Paint the small o .
6. Let dry.
7. Cut out.
8. Add glue.
9. Glue the large O on the 2nd piece of paper and the small o in the upper right hand side.

Alphabet Books

Alligator Alphabet by Stella Blackstone and Stephanie Bauer. I was so excited to find this book because just this week my son started pointing out lower case letters in text. This book is a beautifully illustrated book with each letter represented on its own page. Pretty standard right? Wrong, although the text below the illustration had both upper and lower case letters, the main illustration is only the lower case letter. This is perfect for children like my son who are just starting to learn their lowercase letters.

T is for Touchdown: A Football Alphabet by Brad Herzog is a beautiful book that will delight even those of us who are never happy to see football season start. I admit even being an anti fan this book was fun and really full of information that even a football scrooge like myself can appreciate. Also it’s easy to read simply the letters and look at the pictures for little ones and has genuinely interesting blurbs for each page for older children.

Museum ABC by the Metropolitan Museum Of Art is a book that was first loved at our house because of the “C is for Cat” page , an early interest of my sons. I loved it because for each letter there are 4 usually very cropped pieces of paintings, showing only that part that fits the subject of each letter. In my nerdy love of identifying paintings I play a game with myself trying to figure out which are which as my son is identifying the letter, and finding the subject matter in each. The book is so beautiful, it’s hard to do it justice in a simple review. A wonderful concept and a great intro to art books for even the tiniest patrons.