Capital Letters S and O

I've recently started working with a little boy (age 6) who is learning his letters. We have worked our way through W is for Worm and U is for Underground (with Tillie and the Wall) and T is for Tower and B is for Bubbles (with The Duchess Bakes a Cake). Now it's time for S and O. I'm teaching the letters in pairs, using an overarching story to go with each set of images.

S is for Stars
O is for Otter

We began with a nature walk outside, then came back in and reviewed T and B from last week. We talked about both the name of the letter and the sound. He dictated his summary to me and I guided him in making the illustration for his book (obviously, T is a tall tower with a turret... and I showed him that B is the straight line of the bubble wand with a small bubble on top and a medium-sized bubble below it).

Next I got out the set of laminated wall cards for L M N O P and All the Letters A to Z, and showed him the illustration for T (which is also a tower).

Then I showed him their illustration for S, a scene which includes a swath of stars in the sky which make the shape of an S, along with the smoke from the chimney and the snake slithering in the grass. Inspired by this, I gave him a soft foam roller which is covered with stars and a little tiny paint tray (thank you to Leslie for the donation of new art supplies for the classroom!) and we made the S shape in the sky on some pale blue pastel paper, just like in the illustration. It helps to practice this beforehand, and to have quite a large piece of paper, since you have to do a straight line and then change directions, and then do another one in order for your stars to not be smudgy. It does look quite a lot like the picture in the book, though!

(I have other suggestions for the letter S on the Capital Letters page of my website, including Seahorse and Snake. Hadn't thought of Smoke before but it's a really good idea and would lend itself well to some shaving cream finger painting.)

Time for our story! While the starry art was drying, I read him A Lot of Otters by Barbara Helen Berger.

After the story, we went shopping in my "paint store" area downstairs to find some otter paint colors, where he decided on tan and white. We squeezed some paint out onto a paper plate, used a popsicle stick to blend the colors, and used a sweet potato as the stamp for the otter faces in the water (on our blue paper, below the stars). I like sweet potatoes for potato printing because they tend to have a long pointy end which works really well as a handle. We did several otter faces and then cut it farther down on the potato near the end so we would have a littler circle for the baby otters.

This, too, needed time to dry, so we played the Life on Earth memory game from eeBoo. When the potato printed circles were dry, we added little otter faces using black paint and a teeny tiny brush. Two little black dots for eyes, a larger black circle for the nose, and a few little whiskers. Voila! So sweet!

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