This Week In Tot School...

This week was all about the alphabet. Specifically: lowercase and phonics. It wasn't an overly busy week, but we had fun and Will surprised me several times with things he already knew.

For example, I knew Will was pretty solid with his knowledge of the uppercase alphabet (as well as some lowercase) and I'd been thinking up all kinds of different ways to review the lowercase. I thought about a binder filled with one giant letter on each page or making letter art projects. Ultimately, though, I just decided to keep it simple and have him pair the letters together as a matching game. Our Melissa & Doug letter magnets were the perfect tool for this. I thought about buying a giant dry erase board for this (and any future magnet play), as well as just for drawing, etc. But then I realized we had the perfect magnet board right in our kitchen. We've used the fridge a ton for artwork, photos and the fridge farm toy... but the dishwasher is like a fresh canvas so that's where we worked. And to my surprise, he already knew the entire lowercase alphabet! AND that they were called uppercase and lowercase! When I asked him where he learned this he said "it's on the Letter Factory movie"... That thing was worth every penny! But this was still good practice for him to associate the upper and lowercase together and practice matching.

He did this several times, matching upper to lower and then lower to upper.

I saw this idea on another blog using printables from Making Learning Fun and the woman suggested using alphabet letters for pages. The child has a cork board and lots of push pins (I pushed them into the board off to the side so he wouldn't have to pick them out of the container and risk poking himself). Then they poke each pin into the dots on the letter or picture. It was great fine motor work but I'm not sure it was all that beneficial for alphabet learning. Will had fun anyway.

He absolutely LOVES the Do-A-Dot markers so I wanted to come up with another project with them. Making Learning Fun has TONS of printables, including all the alphabet letters. So I just printed the four first letters of our names: C(raig), A(shley), W(ill), and S(ophia). Each had a picture to go along with and Will had fun stamping up the whole page.

We brought out the lowercase, foam, alphabet puzzle again and Will played with this all week. We came up with several extensions with this toy for more fun learning.

Here's one of them and Will actually started doing this on his own. He took a board book from Sophie's shelf that happened to have a different color on each spread of pages and the name of the color spelled out on the side. He then selected the letters to spell each color on the floor. You can see he spelled "orange" in this picture (...and then flipped back to the beginning and was getting ready to spell "white" next).

Using some bigger foam (uppercase) letters for the bath tub, we started practicing letter sounds by deciding which letter a certain object started with. Again, he had a much better handle on this than I realized, probably from the Letter Factory DVD. I presented these one at a time (one object, two letter choices) on the tray and he breezed right through them.

Next I used a toy he's already familiar with to continue the phonics practice: his chunky puzzles! I wrote the name of each animal on the back of each piece and we'd say the name of the animal out loud and try to guess what letter it started with. Will was not expecting this and was super excited to find the answer on the back of each piece. This also introduced a slightly tougher concept with phonics: the "sh" sound, as in "shark" and (later) "sheep". We didn't touch on "th" or "ch" this night, but I'm sure it won't be long before that's a discussion too.

So after deciding the letter sound each made, Will found the foam letter to go with and placed them on the tray.

We did ocean animals, zoo animals and farm animals.

And even spelled out a couple of them.

Another evening, I set up a really fun game for Will. I wanted to make sure he actually understood the letter sounds and wasn't just making word/letter associations form hearing them so many times, i.e. A is for apple, B is for baby, etc. So I layed out seven pieces of paper and the uppercase letters A-G. First Will found the lowercase match and place it beside each.

Then I gave him a basket of preselected items and he had to place them on the proper letter sound.

Once again, he did very well with this! I am so excited to see how much he knows about letters now and how quickly it has progressed. It doesn't seem that long ago that we were just starting to look at lowercase letters with his blocks! And now he's getting more confident with it and I feel confident that we can build on this with more and more exposure to phonics and written words. He knows all the sounds (with a few that are confusing, like "c" and "k") and it's only a matter of time before he learns that together, these sounds form words that he can sound out and eventually start reading short words! That's incredible to me!

You can see he's saying "b" like "ball". We had a LOT of "b" items.

This was cute: he had just set down a "diamond" (shape) puzzle piece on the "d" page and then decided to flip it over. He said to me "You didn't write on the back of it, mommy." Haha. :)

Here were our objects:

A - (oops! I only had 2 items for A) - apple and apricots

B - brush, bug, block, butterfly, bowl, ball and banana

C - cotton ball, crayon, cat, cow, comb and cup

D - dinosaur, dolphin, diamond, duck and dog

E - egg, envelope (I was so pleased he knew what this was and it's name right away) and elephant

F - farm (it's actually a barn, but I was going for farm so that's what we called it), fish, flashlight (that's a mini flashlight Craig gave Will that he sometimes takes to bed with him - Will loves it) and fork

And G - glue, glasses and goat

We had so much fun with this and I'm excited to do more letters just like this in the near future. Here's a great site for ideas on items for each letter: http://www.tsbvi.edu/Education/alphabet.htm

And actually, this game lead into a lot more letter sound learning just via conversations. I really think that's where a lot of major learning sticks with kids: just by talking to them. So I talk A LOT to Will - openly and clearly with lots of detail and description. He asks lots of questions and I do my best to answer them, but just learning to discuss various topics with people is a great quality for kids to learn. He's interested and curious and it makes our conversation fun. Anyway, we randomly talked about all kinds of objects around us throughout the day, i.e. Will asked me (he likes to "quiz" me even when he knows the answer) what letter "potty" started with while he was sitting on the potty. I made several incorrect guesses first, which he then laughed at. And from there we branched off into what "toilet paper" starts with, or what "light" starts with, or what "shower" starts with, etc.

Another cool site I found has lots of resources for teachers and educators, including lots of songs and poems. Will is already familiar with the song "If You're Happy and You Know It" and this was a variation of that to teach more phonics and get children up and moving. He really liked it and requested it again the next day. Scroll all the way to the bottom here: http://canteach.ca/elementary/songspoems36.html

For each verse, he'd grab the appropriate lowercase letter for each sound and then do the action.

If you're happy and you know it, bounce around "b" "b":

If you're happy and you know it, kick in the air "k" "k":

If you're happy and you know it, laugh out loud "l" "l":

If you're happy and you know it, march in place "m" "m":

Just a cute one:

If you're happy and you know it, yawn right now "y" "y":

So that was our week! We also played outside a lot and practiced making his bed (though I didn't get pictures of this). Sophie is getting a lot of practice with object identification right now. We tell her what everything is called all the time and point to things and give it's name. You can tell she's starting to associate a few because she will obviously look around for Brutus when we say "doggy". She's also signed "all done" and "more" a lot this week. Not always initiating it on her own, but signing it when we ask her or she hears it from someone. I was even talking to the babysitter about someone with the last name of "Moore" while I was holding her and she signed for "more" when she heard me say it. LOL :)