Have you heard of learning journals?! We love them so much! Not only are they therapeutic to create but they are interactive, fun, and meaningful for my kids. Kade (4) is technically the only one with a journal at this point but I have done some make shift journal pages for Tatum (2) as well and plan to get her a journal of her own sometime soon.

My friend Alison started a summer reading program at the start of summer for her kiddos that we decided to join in on. You can read all about it on her blog here. Each week there is a different theme, and so far we have covered ice cream week, camping week, and this week we have been celebrating the 4th of July! For each theme, one thing that I have loved doing is creating a series of journal pages for Kade that follow along with the theme. I wanted to share our 4th of July pages with you here!

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For this activity, we were working on letters and letter sounds. You could choose any letters or even use multiple pages to work on all 26! I chose some of the letters with trickier sounds that I know kids tend to get stumped on. I also chose a couple that I knew Kade would know to help build his confidence. We used red and blue do-a-dot markers to stamp the tops and bottoms of each popsicle. You could also write uppercase and lowercase letters on red and blue dot stickers and work on letter matching.

Roll & cover is such a great, simple activity that covers so many early numeracy skills! Plus it's so easy to set up, and there are so many creative ways to play. For example, we used these fun, sparkly pom poms to cover each number rolled because I thought they looked like fireworks in the sky. When using a dice, kids are learning to recognize the number of dots just by looking at them rather than having to count every dot each time. In the math education world, this is called subitizing (automatically seeing “how many”). They are also working on number recognition by finding each number to cover. I color coded our numbers this time too so Kade was also having to find and match the correct colored pom to each number.

Not much explanation needed here. I scattered a different number of red, silver, and blue star stickers around the page, and then used markers to add a color coded box at the bottom for each number. Kade loves the color coded boxes and calls them his "secret codes." Whatever works, right? Since Kade is not independently writing numbers yet, I supplied him with some bottle caps that we have saved with numbers written on them. He found the correct numbers and placed them in the corresponding colored boxes. For numbers, you could also use number stickers, dot stickers with numbers written on them, or magnetic numbers.

 I always like to include some form of pre-writing activity in our journaling as fine motor is an area that Kade could always use more practice in. I figured for this pre-writing activity we would double/triple dip and also work on uppercase/lowercase letter matching, AND do a little mini intro on vowels. We said the vowels together a few times and talked about how important they are. I told him that they are like the super glue letters that hold words together because you can't make a word without at least one of them. Then we looked for the lowercase versions of each letter and Kade tried to draw a line to match the two. He got a lot a little confused on one of his lines and I tried making him feel better by saying that fireworks have a tendency to go all wicky wacky anyway.. he thought this was funny and then made all his lines go “wicky wacky.” This is what I get for trying to make a joke. ;)

I can't take full credit for this one as I saw it on Pinterest recently (of course I can't remember where and didn’t actually save the pin). I changed up a few of the items but thought it was such a fun idea. Kade had a blast with it and was so excited to find each item!

Did these make you want to start a journal?! I hope you do! If you do, or if you try any of these activities, be sure to tag me on social media so I can see- it’s always so fun seeing different variations and it makes my day to see other kiddos enjoying learning. Also feel free to pin any of these ideas that inspired you so that you can save them for a rainy day- many of them could be adapted to an any-day activity (as opposed to 4th of July themed).

As always, thanks so much for stopping by and visiting my site. Please don’t hesitate to reach out via e-mail or on social media if you ever have questions about any activities I post. :)