F is for . . .

. . . float. We found letters and created words using floating bottle caps. 

The kids would pick a letter or word from the laminated word stips. Then they would fish out the bottle caps with the correct letters on them. 

This is an engaging and easy activity to do any time. You just need plastic bottle caps (like from juice containers, milk gallons, or gatorade bottles), water, and a slotted spoon. I just used a sharpie to write the letters on the inside of the cap. Sometimes they start to fade and I just rewrite them when that happens.  . . . fly. The kids practiced identifying letters with our fly swat game. I would call out a letter and they would swat it with the fly swatter. Want to play your own fly swat game? Download our alphabet of flies here.

. . . fall. We read the book, Let It Fall. After we used tissue paper to make our own fall trees. 

Letter Stomp

Practicing letters during the summer doesn't have to be boring. Try this fun letter stomp game! Write a letter on the top of paper cups. Call out the letter or the letter sound and when your child finds the right one, they stomp the cup flat. It is strangely satisfying and educational at the same time!

Letter Walk

 

Good readers notice letters and words everywhere. Here is a great activity for using at school, at home, or even in the car. The activity is simple, but is great for raising letter awareness and working on letter recognition. Simply write letters around the edge of a styrofoam plate. Cut slits between each letter. When they find a letter, they rip that letter off of their plate until they have found the whole alphabet. 

The kids had so much fun looking for letters all around the classroom. 

They even found letters on someone's shirt and thought that was a lot of fun.  

 

Letter Poking

 Here's a simple way that we practice letters. Each week we do a letter of the week and have a corresponding worksheet. The day that we don't do the worksheet, we do poke letters. I print a large upper case and lower case letter on a paper. Then the kids use a skewer to poke the letter. As they poke it, they alternate between saying the letter name and the letter sound. Pretty easy and a good way to practice our letters. 

Spoon Letter Matching

 As we learn our letters, the kids work on learning upper case and lower case letters simultaneously. Here is a great activity the kids worked on to identify their letters and match upper and lower case letters. 

We wrote all the lower case letters on clear spoons and the upper case letters on white spoons. When the kids found the letter matches, they stacked them on top of each other to see both the upper case and lower case letter at the same time. 

After they found all the matches, they worked on putting the spoons in alphabetical order.

  

J is for Jack and the Beanstalk

 If you have never had the pleasure of reading Jack and the Beanstalk by Steven Kellogg, you are missing out on one of literature's great treasures. Amazing pictures, great rhythm to the words and all around fun to read!This is my favorite retelling of this story. 

After we read the story, we did a sequencing activity with pictures that tell the story. Then we made our own beanstalks while practicing matching lowercase and uppercase letters a- j. 

Making it is pretty simple, just a paper beanstalk, paper leaves with letters on them, and glue. 

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!

Straw Letters and Shapes

My kindergartner got an assignment to bring a 3-D shape for show and tell. We thought we would take it up a step from just finding a 3-D shape to making one. This project is so simple and it is a crowd pleaser! What started with myself and my kids, quickly became a neighborhood affair. We live in a great cul-de-sac and there is always someone knocking on our door asking if someone can play. As the kids in the neighborhood came to the door and saw what we were doing, they decided to join us. It was a lot of fun! 

This activity is pretty simple. You start with straight straws (if you have bendy straws, just cut the bendy part off) and cut up pipe cleaners. As I was opening a new bag of pipe cleaners I noticed that they were labeled as chenille sticks on the package. I kind of like that. It makes them sound extra fancy. I think Fancy Nancy would certainly call pipe cleaners chenille sticks. :)

Anyway, the straws are the sides of the shapes or letters and the pipe cleaners are the points or vertices. 

This is a great activity that can span from preschool to upper grades. You can practice making flat shapes to work on shape recognition

or you can work on 3-D shapes and talk about edges, vertices, faces, etc. (Notice the cube and tetrahedron on the shelf in the background.)

You can also use it to practice letter building. Not all letters can be made, but you sure can try! A is for Anya!

L is for Letter

We did a letter walk for letter L week. I wrote the alphabet around the edges of a plate and we walked around trying to find all the letters. When we found a letter, we folded it down and tore it off. (It was a styrofoam plate.)

Thank you to Whatdidudo2day for the fun idea!

Alphabet Fly Swat

I don't know about you, but I hate flies. We live near a cow farm so flies are an inevitable part of our existence. Of course, since we have kids that love to play outside and often forget to close the door, flies are sometimes found flying around the house. My kids love it because I pay them 5 cents for every fly they kill. Plus, there is something satisfying about swatting something with a fly swatter. 

Well, here is a fun way to practice your letters and get that satisfying swat without the annoying flies that actually buzz around. These fake flies are just the trick. 

Put the alphabet fly pictures up on a wall or on the floor and call out the letter name or the letter sound. When the kids find the correct fly, they swat it with a fly swatter. Use as few or as many of the fly letters as you need to practice.  Pretty easy and pretty fun! 

Click here to get a free printable of the alphabet flies. 

B is for alpha Builders

  

We found a great letter learning tool from this blog. She calls them alpha builders which is a very perfect name. You use the different shapes to build letters. This is going to be a new staple in our letter learning curriculum! 

I made one change to her directions, instead of using magnetic laminate, I just laminated and attached magnets to the back. It still worked great and this was an awesome discovery and learning experience!

Thank you so much Erica!