Apple Tree Alphabet Letter Game

Fall is for apples, acorns, leaves, and learning letters! Incorporate these themes into hands-on literacy activities with your kids including this free alphabet apple tree printable. This would be perfect for a fall preschool theme!

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Letter Formation with KORXX Cork Building Blocks

KORXX cork building blocks are a favorite for our entire family. These sustainable and eco-friendly toys inspired endless free play and educational opportunities. Cork has natural unique characteristics that allows kids and adults together to build in ways where other blocks literally can't stand up!

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Pumpkin Name Spelling Activity

There are so many hands on and authentic ways to help preschool children learn to spell. Most children at this age are working with their names but you could use these for letter identification or to spell sight words! We added a fall themed twist this time by putting the letters on pumpkins for a free printable you can use at home or in your classroom! These will be perfect for teachers for Halloween or Fall literacy centers. too. 

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Find the Letter Snack Sheet for Kids

Kids love snacks! We added a bit of learning to snack time by creating a letter identification sheet that works perfectly with round pretzels.

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Spelling Sensory Sink

Our kids love sensory play activities! We used an indoor sensory sink as an invitation to explore letters and work on spelling. 

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Ice Alphabet

Ice letters are a great way to play while you explore the alphabet. They are the perfect sensory experience in the summer or winter! 

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Playful Ways to Learn Alphabet Letters

We've already written about how we don't do letter of the week with our kids. A common question we hear often is then how do we teach the letters of the alphabet? How do our kids practice both letter identification and letter sound relationships in a playful way? We're sharing our favorite ways to play as we learn letters! 

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Rainbow Sticky Wall Letter Formation

We love to brighten up our days with colorful rainbow learning activities! We created a sticky wall full of letters to practice letter formation for homeschool preschool.

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Personalized Books for Kids from I See Me! Books

If you are looking for the perfect personalized and educational gift for your kids you will love I See Me! Books! Our kids are thrilled by these bright, colorful, fun stories that contain their names and photos.

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Glow in the Dark Sensory Sink Letter Hunt

This month the 12 Months of Sensory Dough Series brings you glowing dough recipes! We hid letters in glow in the dark gelatin to add literacy excitement to our sensory play.

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Letter Stamping on the Light Table

We loved learning with our alphabet slime so much that we had to put the clear slime back on the light table for this month's version of 12 Months of Sensory Dough: Slime Dough!

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Alphabet Sensory Bin

This alphabet sensory bin is a huge favorite of both my preschooler and toddler! It solely contains various letter manipulatives and provided endless literacy opportunities for matching, comparing, and sorting letters.

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Literacy Easter Basket Ideas

Looking for ways to include a few educational items in Easter baskets for kids?  Here is a list of our favorite literacy toys and materials!

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Peeps Play Dough Recipe

When your littlest learners are still sometimes putting things in their mouths you might be worried about giving them sensory recipes to explore. That was certainly the cause in our house when we created our Nutella play dough. Excited to experiment with other edible dough recipes, we headed to the kitchen cabinets again and voila! We created a recipe for edible marshmallow Peeps play dough.

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DIY Acorn Letter Manipulatives

Natural treasures are abundant this time of year! We love to craft, play, and explore with acorns. I turned our collection into DIY letter manipulatives.

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Cars Play for Letter Recognition

Yesterday I needed a quick activity for both kids after lunch, but before nap time.  E wanted to play with her daddy's vintage micro machine cars, so I dug out the masking tape to make some roads for her.

I put some tape pieces on D's hands and then his feet for him to explore.  This, of course, was only done under close supervision.  

Next, we added a parking lot.  It was great fine motor practice for E to line up the cars and park them.

Then, I remembered this post from Juggling With Kids using cars to learn sight words.  I adapted it to E's level by tailoring it to what she needs to work on currently: lower case letter recognition (especially the letters that don't look the same as their uppercase counterparts).

I would say, "Can you park a pink car on the letter h?"  We practiced the letter sounds by saying them while we drove the cars to their parking space, too.  The most realistic letter sounds for this were /r/, /g/, and /z/.  The /s/ sounded like he needed to put air in his tires!

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Emerging Writing

E came downstairs this morning with a note she had written for my parents who live on the other side of the state.

I had her "read" me what she had written so I could underwrite.

This was an exciting development for many reasons:

- It was completely independent and self motivated work.

- E has internalized and been inspired by a lot of modeled reading and writing behavior.  My parents regularly write to her and send her packages in the mail.  She sees me writing notes and lists often.  She helps me write on her projects, adding meaningful text to birthday cards and helping me determine the initial sounds of words as I write them for her.

- I could pinpoint her stage of independent writing.  She is creating scribbles moving from left to write horizontally across the page.  Her "signature" shows some mock letters in her name.  (Sometimes her independent E has more than three lines to it.)

- She saw my enthusiasm over this note.  I underwrote, took a picture, and showed her how I am emailing it to her grandparents.  (You can see where I started to rip the note out of her notebook to mail it, but she protested.)  She then went on to write more letters for a good portion of an hour, dictating out loud who she was writing to and what she was saying to them.  I wish I had recorded this because it was priceless! She was "writing" too fast for me to keep up with her ideas.  When she saw me blogging about this, she decided to get her play laptop and camera so she could "take pictures on the 'puter and write" there, too.

---
E's age: 3 years, 1 month

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Letter Recognition

I am starting to feel like letters are taking over our house.  We are both to blame.  E loves her "ABCs" and I've been digging out all the letter manipulatives I can find from my teaching days.  If you think about it, you don't need to know letter names to read, but it is where we start reading instruction.  Letter recognition or letter naming is important so you can start having discussions about how words are spelled and what letters make what sounds.

I made a basket of all of these items that either of us can access any time we want to do some letter recognition activities.  In fact, E just brought a letter puzzle up to me now and asked me to open it so she can work while I type this.  I like to ask her to practice with me sometimes, but other times just have the letters mixed in with her other toys so she seeks them out herself.

We practice with her letter magnets every day during calendar.  Usually I say, "Can you find the (letter)?"  

Yesterday, I made this paper with the alphabet (in order) so she can match the magents and put them back.  Yesterday we played a game where I took a magnet off while her eyes were closed and said, "Which letter is missing?"  She answered and then we switched roles.  A small change, but she loved it!

When working on letter recognition, remember that asking,

"Can you find the T?"

is different than

pointing to a T and saying, "What letter is this?"

In one case you are providing the letter name and in the other case you are asking the child to produce it.  Both are important skills, but you should vary what you are asking.

Just in the last week while working with letters I've noticed that E knows almost all of her uppercase (confusion with U and W) so we are going to move on to more uppercase and lowercase letter matching.  I also noticed that she will put the G upside down if working with manipulatives...interesting!  The more we work with letters, the more her print awareness increases.  She is pointing out "ABCs" everywhere when we are out and about.

If you are just starting letter recognition with your child, I recommend the letters in their name for more meaning.  Name puzzles with the letters cut apart are how we began with E.

Here is what she set up during breakfast today.  She asked Daddy to find some letters for her.  Then he asked her to find the Zz (notice there is no Zz) and the poor girl looked and looked but would not give up and point to an incorrect letter!  

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Bathtub Learning

Lately, I've been taking some time when E is not in the bathroom to clean her artwork off the tub walls.  Then I add my own art for her to find!  I did animals for pretend tub play during our farm theme.  She colored them in and fed them for several days.

We use these crayons which we got during the holidays.  They've lasted all year and wash off well:

Last night after she went to bed, I washed the animals off.  I added uppercase letters, her first and last name, shapes, and numbers.

During her bath, I asked her to find and circle letters and numbers.

After we did a few of those, she started erasing them with a wet brush, saying, "Bye bye E!  Bye bye L!"

Numbers, too!

She also erased her name, spelling it as she did so.

She loved this activity!

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Letters, Letters, Everywhere!

E has really taken off in her letter naming abilities.  I'm not sure if this is because of our more concentrated focus on them since we started preschool homeschooling or if it would have happened at this age anyway.  Regardless, I love it!  I told myself that if working with her in an academic way was a struggle for us, I would stop.  I was still always secretly hoping that she would be like me when I was little, wanting to "play" school, and thinking that workbooks were cool gifts.  Right now, this is fun for us both, so we are rolling with it.

She is picking out letters wherever we go.  We are lucky enough to live close to Hershey, home of the original chocolate factories.  Driving past the other day, she said, "Look, Momma!  ABCs!  I see an H!"

As I type this, she is sitting beside me, naming the letters along with her Leapfrog: Phonics Farm DVD.  

She always wants to know a word or name that starts with each letter because this is a way to make the letters meaningful to her.  She will say a letter, then ask, "For...?" wanting me to tell her a person we know who has a name that starts with the letter.  I need to start a list because we have people we love whose names start with U and X, but Z is stumping me.

Yesterday, at snack time, she told me that this pretzel looked like a D for baby D (her little brother).  She was so proud of herself for finding a D and making this real life connection to what it represents!  

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