Alligator
This is a pretty classic letter of the week idea, but my son and I were both so excited about how cute the alligator turned out to be. The foam teeth and googly eyes really helped turn the A into an alligator. Don’t miss the additional activity for more ideas about how to incorporate letters into playtime.
- Gather your materials. You will need 2 pieces of construction paper ( different colors), 2 googly eyes, some white foam or paper will do, glue, scissor and markers.
- Draw a large upper case A on one piece of construction paper. I added two triangles on one side of the A for eyes.
- Give your child the A and have them color it to their liking. We have been talking about inside vs outside a lot this week so I shouted out “Inside the A” and ‘Outside the A” and my son obliged, it made it a little silly but fun.
- While they color cut out some triangles for alligator teeth.
- Cut out the A
- Glue it
on the 2nd piece of paper.
- Add glue to the eyes ( you can see where we had glue all over above the eye, no biggie, just wipe it)
- Add the googly eyes
- Add dots of glue for the teeth
- Add the teeth. Let dry.
Books!
“Alligator Alphabet” by Stella Blackstone and Stephanie Bauer. I was so excited to find this book because just this week my son started pointing out lower case letters in text. This book is a beautifully illustrated book with each letter represented on it’s own page. Pretty standard right? Wrong, although the text below the illustration had both upper and lower case letters, the main illustration is only the lower case letter. This is perfect for children like my son who are just starting to learn their lowercase letters.
“Alligator Baby” by Robert Munsch is a ridiculous story that will have your child laughing and screaming “No no that’s not a people baby!” The story is about a family who brings home the wrong baby, over and over again. Finally the older sister takes things into her own hands and saves the day. Kids love this story, it’s not the best bedtime book though, my son was very very hard to settle down after laughing so hard at this one.
Additional Activity
Cookie Sheet Letter Board
Looks simple doesn’t it? It is. All I did was buy $1 magnetic letters at Wal-mart and grabbed a cookie sheet from my pantry. My son has been playing with this on and off for days. Here are some of the fun things we’ve done.
- All the letters on the sheet- take turns finding a letter and taking it off
- All letter off the sheet, taking turns finding a letter and putting it on
- Grouping the letters by color
- Counting the letters as we put each on , and taking them off again.
Of course we labeled each letter as we did this. It is definitely simple but it was also a lot of fun.
