D is for drawing

 

Here is an example of a fun squiggle page we did during letter d week. 

Want to know what a squiggle page is? Click here. 

You can learn about drawing prompts and squiggle pages as a great way to foster creativity and let the imagination run wild!

You can also download some free printable squiggle pages for your own use on that page.  

Rainbow Letters and Numbers

This is one of my favorite ways to practice writing letters or numbers. We call them rainbow letters because the look so colorful and pretty when you're done.

Provide an outlined letter or number. Have the child write inside the outline of the letter 7-10 times using a different color each time. Make sure they write the letter using the proper form and in the proper order. Ex. For letter E down, out, out, out. For the younger kids I put a black dot where they need to start writing their letter each time.

Choosing a good font can be a challenge with this activity because you want the letters to reflect the elementary block font that they will be learning in kindergarten. I like to use Print Clearly from fontspace.com. It offers a normal, bold, and dotted form. It is free to download. The dotted form is especially helpful when you want the kids to practice writing specific words, like their name. 

You can print it dotted for them to trace. I love it and use it daily for name practice!

Enjoy!

Drawing Prompts & Squiggle Pictures

I realized the other day that a lot of the activities we do are pretty structured and I wanted to offer an activity that allowed for more creative thinking. I saw an idea to do drawing prompts which looked like fun. Then I remembered another idea to encourage creativity that I used when I was teaching third grade. We used to give the kids squiggle papers.

Drawing prompts are where you start a picture and allow the children to add details and complexity to the picture.

For example, I started this picture and posed the question, who lives in this tree?

Anya finished the picture and this is what she did. This is Lilly the squirrel who lives in a tree in the water. She's small so she can't swim, and has to stay in her tree. But, when she gets bigger she will learn how to swim like a big girl.

Squiggle pictures are  a lot of fun too. Basically you start with a squiggle or doodle on a paper and then have your kids create a picture out of the lines that are already there by adding to it. You can have the kids tell you the story about their pictures or write a story about it if they are old enough. This is an example squiggle page that I did.

Then Anya added to it and expanded the picture. I wrote her story for her. It is about a girl who is decorating her Christmas tree, but one of the ornaments is lost.

When you are writing the story, make sure to write exactly what they say. Don't edit or change words because part of the charm is "hearing" them tell you about it every time you read the page.

It's pretty fun to see where their imagination can take them!

If you want some premade squiggle pages that you can just print out, you can download them here. 
When you click on the link, there are a lot of ads on the page. You want to click the small grey download button right beneath the box that says view document. You will need to sign in to download the paper. You can sign up for a free 4shared account or use your social media outlet to download. Please leave a message below if you have any problems or questions. 

Bottle Cap Alphabet Soup

My daughters and I had a fun time practicing our letters and making words using simple things that you probably already have at home. The great thing about this game was that it worked for all three age levels of my girls - toddler, preschooler, & elementary aged. Read below for how I changed it up for each age level.

 

We started by collecting plastic bottle caps from things we were getting ready to recycle (milk jugs, juice, gatorade, water, etc.). I wrote a letter on each cap with permanent marker, relating to the words we were working on. (In this case I used letters from the names of the people in our family.) 

 

**In these pictures, you will also see baby food jar lids, but we found out that they don't work as well because they sink.**

We filled up a bucket of water and put the letters in. A towel under the bucket and on the table is really good for this project. The girls used a slotted spoon to fish out and play with the lettered bottle caps at their own level:

My toddler just had fun trying to grab the letters. If your toddler is ready, you could have them grab certain colors or draw shapes instead of letters on the bottle caps.

My preschooler worked on makings words from word cards and identifying letters. She is really into writing the names of the people in our family right now so I used this to practice the spelling. I wrote the names of all the members of our family on 3 X 5 cards for her to use. She would spell each name, using the word card as a guide. (I learned the hard way that the word cards should be laminated. It was one of those, "Uh, duh Laura" moments.)

 My elementary aged daughter made up words with 4 letters or more from the letters in the bucket. She could make any word that she wanted, but had to spell it correctly. (Kind of like that text twist game on yahoo, is anyone else out there addicted to it too?) 

It was a really fun and easy project that is great for hot summer days!

Tip of the Month: The Write Stuff

There are many steps along the road of learning to write letters. Children must have many opportunities to use their hands to do various things before they can successfully print letters. Many of the things we do during center time and activity time help your child develop their fine motor skills to help them take those steps towards writing. Here are some ideas of what we do that you can also do at home to help your child develop the skills needed to write:

1. Modeling with clay
2. Using small and large Legos
3. Picking up beads
4. Playing with knobbed puzzles
5. Using paper, paper clips, staples, pencils, markers, and crayons
6. Stencils
7. Sidewalk chalk
8. Finger painting or painting with large brushes

Encourage your child to write notes to their friends or messages to other important people in their life. As they are playing dress-up or pretend, encourage them to write props to add to their play: menus, shopping lists, paper money, tickets for a show, signs for shops, etc.

As children experiment, developmental stages of writing become evident. Children move from random scribbles to controlled scribbles, to random alphabet letters, to consonants that represent words. Only with lots of opportunities to practice can children move through these stages.

If your child does not have a proper pencil grip, cannot purposefully manipulate a crayon, or simply shows no interest in learning to write, they probably aren't ready to do so. Take care not to push. Children enjoy learning a new skill only when they are ready for it. Getting ready is just as important as mastering the skill.

Christmas is a great time to stock up on writing material for your child. They make great stocking stuffers and gifts!

- Excerpts taken from Brad Wilcocks

Tip of the Month: Beginning Writers

As parents we get a lot of information about reading, but we rarely hear about the important development of writing. Writing, drawing, painting and other fine motor skills are so important to practice for further development. You should be writing or doing some other form of written expression with your child every day. Make sure to check how you child is holding their pencil, crayon, etc. Below I have included a quick overview of the early stages of writing and spelling. The picture is small, so click on it to see the details of each stage. Preschool aged children generally range between a one and a four.