X Stuff

Well, it's a new year and ABC Stuff is back on the agenda. I asked Talmage this week if he wanted to do ABC Stuff and I got a resounding "YES, YES, YES, YES!!!" The last time I saw any enthusiasm for the project was back in July, I kind of got a lukewarm response in August, and did a bit of arm twisting in September before abandoning my efforts all together. The biggest shame of all of this is that I've largely abandoned art projects without the motivation. The upside? You wouldn't BELIEVE the amount of irrelated stuff you can get done when your son plays computer games all day!

Tyler got an Ipod Touch recently, and Talmage loves it. LOVES it. We have a two hour screen time rule at our house, and we've been quite impressed that Talmage likes to save his screen time until Daddy gets home with his Ipod. That means no TV, computer, or the like until 5 or 6 pm, so I am again aware that I need to do some mothering. Hence the reigniting flame in the ABC burner.

I've tried to preference the sound a letter most commonly makes in ABC Stuff. I've been able to make it work so far, but X threw us for a loop. When x is at the beginning of a word, it doesn't really make the "ks" sound, so we had to improvise.

For Christmas I bought the Dr. Seuss collection for beginning readers, and we got a lot of mileage out of Fox in Socks this week.

Activities

Ox: The simple yet enduring paperbag puppet.



You know, it wasn't until I did this project that I realized that I don't really know what an ox is. A male cow? Then what's a bull? Is it a whole nother species? So I did a little Wikipedia research. Fascinating stuff. An ox is "a castrated male (occasionally a female or in some areas a bull) kept for draft purposes." I didn't tell Talmage though. I decided to wait until he's five before I explain castration.

Here and here are the templates.

The Gingerbread Man (featuring a fox): I printed out the story from this website. Talmage watercolored the pages. We then bound the book together with string.

For your viewing pleasure, here is the final page in the book:



Xylophone:



I broke my own rules, since this starts with a Z sound. What can I say? English is difficult.

Talmage colored in this template, this template, and this template. He was very particular about his colors. Have I mentioned that he's a CRAZY perfectionist? He is.

X is for safety: I liked this because Tal practices writing the letter X, and he learns not to poison himself. Win, win!

We printed off this sheet. Then we put an X through the items we don't eat.



Treasure hunt. fox, ox. That's it. The treat was Trident sugarfree gum (with xylitol). Or Twix! Why didn't I think of Twix! And I just found Airheads Xtremes at the store. And to think, I went with xylitol.