Getting Started With B!

Letter learning has finally started in our house with the ultimate goal of touching on most of the letters before the end of the summer.  Why not all of the letters?  To be honest, I'm notorious for having a billion ideas of grandeur that I "plan" to do over the summer but suddenly summer is over, and I'm left with too many unfinished projects.  Actually, I'm left with projects I never even STARTED.  So, my hope is that by blogging about our letter learning adventures, I will stay committed to finishing, while sharing our activities with you and you sharing yours with us too!

Before we officially started, I made a trip to Target and JoAnn's. (I had to hide my excitement from my husband.  I can't tell you how much I love making trips to these places by myself even if just for an hour.  I was in mommy heaven!)   I stopped by the Dollar Spot at Target and found a fun magnifying glass (which doesn't really work, but that wasn't why I bought it!), a sketch pad to serve as my a letter book, and new play dough.  Next, I went to JoAnn's where I found six sheets of letter stickers for $1.00 (in the teacher section), a butterfly activity, and then found a bug-themed cupcake kit and this cool animal letter pack in the clearance section!

Once I got home, I wrote one pair of upper and lower-case letters on each page of the letter book and gathered extra stickers we had around the house.  I put everything in a little plastic bin and was ready to get started.

On Wednesday, we began with the letter B, the first letter of my daughter's name. I wanted to introduce her to the letter and to understand that there was a capital and lower-case B.  So, we put the "big/little" B stickers in her letter book.  We added other stickers that had the B sound to her letter book as well.  During this time, I also used auditory bombardment.  (In the speech world this is an evidence/research-based therapy exercise in which a child hears a target sound continuously in a short amount of time through letter sounds and words.) Next, we used the animal alphabet letter activity from my steal at JoAnn's, and then we took play dough and had some fun shaping the upper and lower case letter B.   Given a three-year old's attention span, we needed to move around a bit, so we went to her room to read a book.  (This is when she used her magnifying glass!)  We sat down to read "Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?" by Eric Carle.  As I read, it was her job to play detective and try to find the upper and lower case Bs.  Wow!  Was that a success!  She loved it and even identified the letters in other books later that evening when we read before bed!

Before putting my daughter down for a nap, we put the bug (BumBleeBee and ladyBug) cupcake liners in the muffin tin.  Once she fell asleep, I enjoyed a much needed cup of coffee and started baking away.  When she woke up, the cupcakes hadn't yet cooled, so we did one more B activity, making a melted bead butterfly sun catcher.  Apparently, I didn't read the recommended age of 8+ for this activity, so it took a little bit longer (ok, a lot longer) that I anticipated, but nonetheless, we had a blast AND the cupcakes had plenty of time to cool.

We frosted the cupcakes, added sprinkles (per her request), and finally added the bugs to the top of the cupcakes.   We boxed them up to deliver them to the neighbors (a segue way into my next letter post…N)!

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