Mom School

At the beginning of the summer I decided to do alphabet crafts to introduce the alphabet to Peyton and make sure Corbyn was ready for kindergarten. We called it mom school and for the most part, the kids looked forward to it. My friend, Emily, asked If I could do a post about where I got my ideas and what is in my school supply box, so Emily this is for you!

Most weeks we did 2 letters. I tried to get everything cut out and ready Monday night, so we could do them anytime that fit with our schedule during the week. I only did the crafts found here because when I did joy school for Corbyn I learned you can spend A LOT of time searching Pinterest for the perfect letter craft! These crafts are great because they all have patterns which makes the prep work quick and easy (and with a new baby I was all about that).

I posted pictures from our crafts on my Instagram and everyone probably got sick of seeing them there, but it kept me motivated to finish the whole alphabet!

As far as supplies go, I already had most of the supplies we needed from when I did joy school and other projects. Most of them are pretty basic and you'll probably find you already have most of what you need. 

*Finger paints

*Cheap paper plates

*Brushes

*Markers

*Crayons

*Child scissors

*Glue sticks - lots and lots of glue sticks!

*Contact paper (only used for letter B, but good to have on hand for other crafts)

*Tissue paper (I just used scraps from my wrapping paper box)

*Googly eyes

*Paper (in assorted colors)

*Stickers

*Buttons (you could always substitute a round sticker or cut a circle out of paper)

*Cotton balls

I found that having white card stock was good for when the craft required painting. For the other colors, I have a variety of card stock and regular printer paper. You definitely need black and brown because you will use those a lot. I keep all my scraps (unless they are really small) to use for other letters/projects. For the letter Q, you'll need some scraps of patterned paper - just dig into that scrapbook stash you have from when scrapbooking was popular.

Occasionally I did buy things - like Fruit Loop cereal for the letter R or star stickers for the letter N. I didn't mind spending a few dollars here and there, but I'm sure you could always find a substitute if you didn't want to buy something.

I didn't always do the projects exactly like she did. I didn't use actual egg shells for the letter E and I didn't have my kids paint with spaghetti for the letter S. For the letter J, Corbyn had made jellyfish in his preschool and he insisted that we had to use crate paper streamers because that's how they did it. For the letter V, I didn't plan ahead and buy vegetables to paint with, so I used some flower cookie cutters we had and that worked fine.

A lot of the crafts are just glueing down paper - sometimes my kids got sick of that, so if I could think of another way to do it, I would do it that way just to shake it up a bit. Like for the letter U, we used fish stickers I had from joy school instead of glueing down cut-out shapes to make fish. 

Just have fun with it! And if you're a perfectionist like me, do your best to let them do the crafts on their own!