Now I know my ABCs

About 11 months ago -- soon after it was decided that I would be a stay-at-home mom and hence, had an infinite amount of time to do things with the kids -- I decided to start a letter project with Austin.

I got the idea from several other blogs, most notably from No Time for Flashcards -- although many other mom blogs have similar ideas. The objective - teach Austin his ABCs in such a way that makes learning fun. So we combined his love for doing crafts with his thirst to learn and started the ABC project. Every letter was shaped into something that started with that letter (sometimes I took the idea from a mom blog, other times I came up with an idea on my own) and when we were finished, we wrote a letter word list. Later (often, many days or weeks later) I took that list and created a picture book to help him learn the words and (hopefully) the letter each word started with.

Notice how the first sentence of this post said 11 months ago? Never did I think that this project would take that long to complete. But it did. Because we would often do two or three letters in a short period of time, and then none again for many weeks. This pattern repeated itself for the last almost year.

But it was worth it as now, the entire wall over our craft table is covered with the ABCs. And, more importantly, Austin knows his ABCs and, with a little help from the wall, can write each letter.

I'm not sure which one of us is more proud of this project -- him because he did them all or me because he did them all! I do know we're going to have to find a new project now that this one is done -- at least until Alex is ready to start learning her ABCs. Then I'll take these letters down and we'll start from scratch.