Abacus: “Letters” – A Creative Curriculum List for February
Giants and Pilgrims Abacus is a creative home curriculum centered on a monthly theme. This month’s theme is “Letters”!
Read all about how to use this list and our heart behind this project here.
A couple of February Dates to keep in mind as you are scheming fun activities-
Groundhog Day = Feb. 2
Valentines Day = feb. 14th
Mardi Gras = Feb. 17th
Ash Wednesday = Feb. 18th
The Chinese New Year = feb. 19th
And if you are in the Greeley area, the Stampede troupe is putting on Treasure Island feb. 27 & 28
Letters:
Language/Writing:
Experiment with tracing paper – cool letters, etc.
Learn/practice cursive and calligraphy – I am excited to revisit this myself (later in the month I will post some really cool charts for this)
Penpal exchange for the month (anyone want in on this?)
Keeping Adventure Logs/Diaries
Adventure:
Set up letter writing stations around town
Visit the local Post Office (do they do tours?)
Art:
Make Sewn Letter mobiles
Mod podge a set of Alphabet rocks
Illustrate our own animal alphabet book
Take an alphabet photo walk – #almanacalphabetseverywhere (put them together, spell names, etc.)
Building:
Construct valentine mailboxes – this one is particularly adorable
Table mailboxes
Reading:
(Various age appropriateness here)
The Jolly Postman by Allan Ahlberg
Letters from Rifka by Karen Hesse
Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
Griffin and Sabine by Nick Bantock
Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney
Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
Vocab – “Epistolary”
Movies
Tommy Tricker and the Stamp Traveller (awesomely bad 90’s movie)
Spellbound – spelling bee documentary
Word Wars – Scrabble documentary
For the Romantics:
You’ve got Mail
P.S. I Love You
Music:
The Postal Service
Abc playlist -We will post ours on Giants & Pilgrims this month
History:
Illuminated manuscripts – I used to make these with my art class using parchment paper, that we would burn the edges of and metallic ink or gold leaf to embellish the drop caps with.
Stamp collecting – I am printing out some of these pages – http://stamps.org/userfiles/file/albums/2014-Issues.pdf and any time we get a letter this month with stamps on it, we will save them and add them to our stamp “album”. The pdf has some nice history stories behind each stamp.
Technology:
Typing games on the computer (suggestions anyone?)
Play with the typewriter
Kitchen:
Alphabet pasta/soup
Math:
Roman numerals
Learn about addresses
Games:
Scrabble
Boggle
Spelling Bee
In the Car – the alphabet game (could be a race), letter finding game, etc.
What would you add to this list?
Share your projects on our facebook group!
Great list, I’d be interested in the pen pal. My daughter is six. When we have done a post office theme in the past, my daughter loved the Toot and Puddle books. We sent post cards to our loved ones on our trip to the post office. 🙂
Hi Angela! Awesome! Lucy is excited already. I will email you to set it up!
thanks for posting tis article