Archive for the ‘Letter Recognition’ Category

House h

This week’s letter of the week craft is fun but be prepared to use paper that matches your house. I had red paper all ready, my h was written out and I hear from across the table ” I want a white house, our house isn’t red mama it’s white!” he was right, our house is white so we started over, I took new materials pictures and we were all set.

1. Gather your materials. You will need 3 colors of construction paper, some markers( crayons will be fine too!), glue, and scissors.
2. Start by writing a lowercase h on your paper.
3. Have your child decorate it anyway they want. My son is starting to show interest in writing and has been tracing the letters lately when we make these crafts then pronounces he’s ready for the next step. I just sit back and watch , loving how this came about so naturally.
4. Ask how many windows they want and cut them out ( I added crossbars) , also cut o.ut a roof and the top of a chimney.
5. Cut the h out and glue it on a contrasting sheet of paper.
6. Time to add the glue for the house pieces!
7. Add the roof.
8. Add the windows and chimney topper.
9. Let dry.

Books

Building a House by Byron Barton is a no frills look at how homes are built. The bright colors and concise wording is perfect for preschoolers. I love that there is writing on one page and illustrations on the other, makes it super easy to show children the pictures as well as for them to see you follow the text with your finger!

A House for Hermit Crab by Eric Carle is a fun book about a hermit crab’s search for things to make her house a perfect home.  Each month she finds another thing ( or sea creature)  in the ocean to add to her house. This book is a good teaching tool for months of the year, sea life and houses.

You May Also Like :

Shape House
Uppercase Letter H Craft
Heart H

Green is Good!

Thank you so much for all of you who completed the reader survey, something I am going to try to incorporate more often by request are crafts that can be done by a wide range of ages. This green g is simple, and a 18 month old just showing interest in letters could easily explore with paint, crayons and markers, but an older child could make work of it as well.  I was pleasantly surprised by how much my son loved this project. My husband and I made dinner while my little artist explored every green marker and paint we had!

1. Gather your materials. You will need some white and green paper,glue, scissors,  a huge assortment of green markers, glitter glue, paint- everything you have ! If you are doing this with a younger child limit as you see fit! You can’t mess this project up.
2. Write a g on your white paper- we are doing lowercase but it will work great with an uppercase as well.
3. Start making it green! We started with do a dot art dobbers.
4. Next up roller paints.
5. Marker time!
6. Last but not least glitter ( my son’s nails still have it embedded on them despite a bath!).
7. Let dry, cut out and glue onto the green paper.

Color Books

Hello, Red Fox by Eric Carle is a fun interactive book about colors and the color wheel. Kids will love the “trick” on each page. The trick being that if you stare at a color for long enough then stare at a blank page the complimentary color will appear! This book is great, but not for a group, a class will disintegrate into “Let me!!” and “My turn!” quickly so this is really is best read one on one!

Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? by Bill Martin Jr. and Eric Carle is a classic, it is genius in it’s simplicity. So often we think things have to have fancy bells and whistles to keep toddlers and preschoolers interested and this book proves us wrong yet again. I haven’t met a child who hasn’t responded well to this book about colors and animals!

Lemons Are Not Red by Laura Vaccaro Seeger is a clever book each page offers a sneak peek at what it next, which my son thought was genius and I have to agree. Soon my son was making his own predictions about what object would be revealed when we turned the page. The book offered so many chances for me to step in and ask my son questions about what we were reading without stalling the momentum of the book.

I am chilling with my little man.  I am waiting for the furnace repair man today after a weekend with wonderful women in Nashville and filling my head and heart with new information and friendships.  I didn’t want to leave anyone hanging so I have found wonderful  letter activities from a number of great blogs around the web. Most are geared towards older preschoolers and young school age kids but are all worth bookmarking for later even if your little one isn’t ready for them quite yet.

This is a fun way to use flash cards – see I don’t think they are inherently evil, they just need to be played with ! Muffin Tin Mom makes a fun game to help teach letters and promote early literacy.

This is from my other blog Craftivity Corner on FamilyEducation.com . We loved matching up the letters and stickers, and my 3 year old was adamant about doing it all by himself. The activity wasn’t too daunting or long but still offered a challenge.

This phonic flip chart from Quirky Momma is a fantastic way to play with letters with children who have started to show interest in spelling . When I went to the next blog I noticed they had linked this exact activity today as well. Hey when an idea is good it deserves recognition!

I had booked marked this word family activity from Preschool Playbook a while back . What a wonderful way to learn dynamically!

I love this idea from Hey, I’m just the nanny. For children who are past the basics and ready to play with sentences using a well loved book ( we all know which ones our kids know so so well) is a great way to scaffold this activity!

I had to include something for the little ones too. This Caterpillar C from Ramblings of a Crazy Woman is so cute I couldn’t resist!

Peacock P !

It’s back!  Our ever popular letter of the week craft is back now that we are in the swing of things. Our philosophy about these projects is to have fun with the letter , to introduce them and play with them. We don’t focus only on this one letter all week, instead we take a whole language approach and continue to work on all letters as they pop up in our every day life and reading. This peacock craft was  a blast to make, he did all the cutting and although I was skeptical that we’d get feathers he did a great job!

1. Gather your materials. You will need 3 pieces of construction paper plus a little scrap of orange paper, some paint, glue , a googly eye and scissors.
2. Start by drawing a p on one piece of paper.
3. Draw tail feathers on another.
4. Paint the tail feathers. We chose to use our Do-A-Dot paints, they were perfect for this craft, but any paint or marker would be great!
5. Add another color!
6. Time to cut it out. I let him go for it this time and I won’t lie to you, I was worried we’d end up with 40 tiny feathers but he did great.
7. While they decorate and paint the feathers, cut out the head feather and beak.
8. As well as the P, add glue to it.
9. Add your feathers to the glue.
10. Glue the P to the 3rd piece of paper .
11. Time to add glue for the beak!
12. Add it on.
13. Add more for the head feather.
14. Pop it on.
15. Last but not least add the eye.

Books

Bees, Snails, & Peacock Tails: Patterns & Shapes . . . Naturally by Betsy Franco is a really cute library find.  The book is non fiction about all the fun shapes and funky patterns that you can find in the animal world. From the beautiful feathers of peacocks to the amazing shapes of a beehive each page discovers a new natural wonder that we often take for granted. What I like about this book is it’s bright bold pictures. so often the non fiction books available at the library are older and their illustrations are not exciting enough for young kids. Steve Jenkins does a wonderful job accompanying the information in the text. The author also does a great job with a rhyming text that is full of just the right amount information.

Animal Antics: A to Z by Anita Lobel is an alphabet book, not a great one but there is nothing lacking either, it’s just adequate.  The setting is a circus and each letter has an animal performer illustrated and acrobats making the corresponding letter above. There is no story line, just a series of these pages. It’s not bad and if your child s really into the circus I could see them loving it, but at our house it was just ok.

The Sleepy Little Alphabet: A Bedtime Story from Alphabet Townby Judy Sierra is a great alphabet book. I couldn’t help myself, I read it to my son to the tune of Chicka Chicka Boom Boom . It is clearly it’s own book though. The alphabet is getting ready for bed and just like your little ones, these lowercase letters are pulling out all their tricks and antics to avoid bedtime. Well almost all of them, z is more than happy to go to bed!  It’s a sweet book that your kids can relate to and I like that it focuses on lowercase letters .

Food f

Food is a great word to use for letter of the week, because there is no doubt your child knows what it means, uses it daily and probably likes it ( most of the time).  We used a recipe magazine that was packed full of pictures so it allowed my son do some of the cutting himself successfully since there were so many to cut out in a small space. This is a fast project so we slowed it down a bit by talking about the food we were cutting out, if we liked it or not and if it was a “growing food” or a “sometimes treat” .

1. Gather your materials. You will need 2 sheets of construction paper, any 2 colors will do, some pictures of food like a recipe magazine or you can draw your own, scissors, a glue stick and marker.
2. Start by writing a lowercase f on one of the sheets of construction paper.
3. Hand your child their scissors, and let them cut out pictures of food. We chatted about what he was cutting and I had to help a lot but he managed to cut a few out with only a little help too, better yet there was no frustration!  That is a huge success for us, cutting is hard and it takes a lot of practice to be precise, so let them practice! I cut many out as well.
4. Gather all the cut out pictures. 
5. Time to glue!
6. Add the food !
7. Cut out the f
8. Glue on the 2nd piece of paper and let dry.

Alphabet Books!

Eating the Alphabet: Fruits & Vegetables from A to Z by Lois Ehlert is an alphabet book extraordinaire! Wonderful paintings of fruits and vegetables seem ultra simple and it is but somehow the way the author has pieced this simple book together is brilliant. Maybe it’s that children learn about food at the table multiple times a day and feel proud being able to identify not only some of the letters but some of the pictures too! From a teaching standpoint I love that there are both upper and lower case letters on each page! This book will grow with your child, and beware it will also make you hungry!

The Abc Bunny by Wanda Gag was first published in 1933 and is delicious! Readers follow along with a little bunny all the way from a to z ! The rhyming text is bouncy and my son was fully engaged. I thought the black and white pictures may throw him off but he loved them and didn’t seem to notice that there was no color, they were beautifully done and that was all that mattered. I love the language used like the words dash, gale and jaunty. Good books are good books no matter when they were written, and readers will always love them, I loved this book.

The Human Alphabet photographs by John Kane. This book is fascinating. Each page is a a different photograph of dancers making the shape of both the letter and something that starts with the letter. The letter is always obvious ( and in order which helps…) but the picture isn’t and I love that.  It forced my son and I to work together to think of words that started with each letter to figure the tricky ones out .