Letter Of The Week
Guide
We took a week off from making our Letter of The Week craft to enjoy a day out as a family for Mother’s Day. Instead I complied the our whole alphabet ! Click on the letter of your choice and it will link you to all the activities we have done for that letter so far. As we add more activities they will be added automatically.
Two Alphabet Books!
” Z Goes Home” by Jon Agee follows the letter Z from the time he leaps down from the sign at the zoo until he makes his way home. Along his travels he encounters all the other letters. Some are of the words the letters represent may be challenging for preschoolers, but the illustrations are clear and your child won’t have too hard a time finding the letter in the picture.
“The Graphic Alphabet
“ by David Pelletier is a fun book to share with a child who has already mastered the alphabet, because this book is challenging. Each letter is shown in it’s own illustration, but you aren’t sure exactly what the picture is of, this is the challenge. As you can see on the cover it has an avalanche, the hardest one for me was N no matter how I looked ta the picture I thought it was of magnets! Turns out it was noodles! Very fun book for kids that already know their letters and are up for a challenge.
More Alphabet Books!
This is a great post – one that must have taken a lot of work!
Awesome ideas! You are so creative! Can’t wait to try these.
Wonderful post, I’ll be coming back to this one for sure!
I love the Jon Agee’s “Z Goes Home”
Are you making this into a book? Or how do you organize them? We are working on our book slowly! haha
Oh wow those are fantastic! When Gretchen is a little older I’ll be referencing your blog A LOT!
What an amazing post and ideas.
We are just starting to do our letter of the week with my toddler. Your blog is a wonderful resource for others.
Thank you
I love all the letter crafts you have made and have been enjoying your blog. 🙂
Sweet! I’ve been slacking on our letter of the week since the weather has been nice – so it will be great to have one place to find everything once we get back into it!
wow! That is excellent! I have been wanting to ask you for a while about your theory for teaching the alphabet. When you taught preschool, did you only teach upper case letters in isolation from lower case? This is what many preschool curricula recommend doing, but I struggle with this because 90% of the letters that a child sees in his/her environment are lower-case, so to me it doesn’t make sense to teach upper case first…or in isolation from lower-case. Just wanted another professional opinion on that 🙂
Incredible!!! Have you thought about printing them in a coffee table style book? Blurb is pretty inexpensive. I think this would make an awesome ABC book— :):)
This is AWESOME!!! I hope it is okay. I plan to write a post about the crafts I am doing with my toddler for Works for me Wednesday and I am going to write about how you have inspired me. I will me linking your blog to my post. I am thinking it could bring you some more traffic, and that is always a good thing. Right?
Anyway, thank you so much for sharing your knowledge with us!!
I am refining my comment I had a 2 year old melting down while writing that.
Here is a more coherent answer 🙂
I have taught both tandem and upper case first. When teaching phonics though lowercase is suggested to be first, since like you said that the majority of letters are lowercase and the children need to be able to know what the letters are and what sounds they make for decoding/ sounding out words.
That said I think that when you are simply introducing them ( well before phonics) uppercase often comes first . Alphabet books , toys etc.. aimed at that age group ( toddlers) are usually uppercase.
In my experience with teaching 2-3 year olds they can easily learn both in either order and since most parents start with uppercase I followed that then did lower case with my 2-3 year olds. I am following that with my son as well.
I am sort of torn though because some literature says that you should start with lowercase and stick with it and introduce uppercase later. I haven’t had any issue doing it the other way . Where as I have had good experiences with kids learning both then focusing on phonics with the lowercase letters.
I think the main thing is that we surround the kids with letters, environmental print and we don’t isolate anything. This is why I struggle with LofTW in the first place, I like focusing on one letter for a craft but I spend just as much time on the other letters throughout the week, point them out, doing letter hunts, asking my son which letter is his favorite etc… I don’t focus only on any one thing.
I am not sure there is a best way- because I have seen both ways work. I think though that there does need to be a focus on lowercase before you can start teaching letter sounds.
I hope that was more coherent- now that my son is fast asleep and not climbing on me!
Thanks for your input, Allie! I agree with you about LofTW…I do teach LOTW, but also use letters ALL the time…throughout the year, we will stretch out words and “write” them on our hands w/ our fingers, using the letters we hear, and obviously much of the time, they are letters the kids haven’t been formally taught yet. I teach the letters in tandem to both my class of 3s and my class of 4s, but I focus more on the sounds and upper-lower case correspondence w/ the 4s. 🙂
Ack in my revision of my thoughts about upper and lowercase instruction I deleted my thanks yous!
Thank you so much for all the kind words.
Katherine I should shouldn’t I?
Lisa- links are always deeply appreciated, thank you so much! I am off to check it out!
Thank you, this will be so cute hanging in my daughters room. Great idea!!
Again, this post and all the work you put in with your children and your blog is amazing. I have given you an award that is well deserved.
Here is the link:
http://preschool2prek.blogspot.com/2009/05/thank-you-for-this-award.html
They look great altogether like that! Hope you had a fantastic mother’s day.
Thank you so much for this post. I have been wanting this. It is so easy now to find the letters. You are too awesome!
What is LofTW?
Letter of the week
Love this!! I have the perfect wall for all those letters too…very cute!
By the time my son was 2, he could ‘read’ letters (identify at sight), upper case primarily and some lower (mostly, because they looked like upper!) When we started focusing on letters and the sound of letters, he really started to improve his speech (he was a late talker). To do this, we would just talk about letters we saw everywhere – cereal boxes, on signs, etc. It was very helpful.
He loves letters. He likes reading them, guessing them, matching them. I’m now working on lower case more because he says all the letters in words he sees and many are a mix of upper/lower. Thanks for your tips about lower helping with phonics, I hadn’t realized that. I also hope to start the French alphabet this summer.
Letters and the alphabet are huge things around here!
WOW! Can’t wait to try these. What a great resource!
HI! I love your craft projects and ook ideas.
I am doing a theme a week (farm animals, outer space, healthy food and lifestyle, colors, nature, under the sea, etc. I have 10 themes)this summer for my 2 guys and got many great ideas from your site.
We are going to do 2-3 letters a week and just incorporate them in to our themes/crafts. Do you think it is fine to do the letters out of order? Or should I do them in order? My oldest knows the letters very well. My youngest is just turning 2 so he is still learning them. He seems to know them out of order though I didn’t want to confuse him. Any ideas?
Yes absolutely do them in whatever order you want. When learning phonics ( the sounds letters make) some people suggest following an order ( there is disagreements on that too) but when you are simply introducing and playing with them do them however they fit authentically into your child’s learning.
thank you thank you for these wonderful ABC posts! a gem for homeschooling families!!
best wishes,
jo
SO GRATEFUL TO HAVE FOUND THESE! ME AND MY 2YR OLD SON LOVE THEM!…THANKS SOO MUCH FOR SHARING.