Ridiculously Fun: R and F

R and F, and by that I don't mean radio frequency,  rheumatic fever, right field, or River Falls (my alma mater.)  Just simply R and F, our next set of letters.  And let me tell you, we had a ridiculously amount of fun learning!

We started learning each letter by identifying upper and lower-case letters using our letter book and animal alphabet letter books.  Then we were on to our activities.

• Princess Treasure Search - I struck gold with this last minute idea.  (Sorry, lame pun.)  I had some left over felt from a previous project, so I cut out small eye patches, punched holes in the upper left and right corners, and tied string through each one.  I grabbed a few pieces of construction paper and cut out circles (i.e. treasure), wrote the upper and lower-case R on each one, and hid them around the living room and dining room.  I used a box full of princess clothes  as a treasure box (after I removed the clothes, of course), but you could use almost any type of container or box.  I just took the easy way out so I didn't have to decorate it.  As soon as she got up from her nap, we put on the "queen" and "princess" eye patches and set off to find the R treasure.  Everything went smoothly except for one small detail; it was hard to search for treasure with only one eye!

• Dancing Raisins - This idea is everywhere, but it's so easy!  All you need is a clear glass, clear soda like 7-Up or Sprite (we had Ginger Ale on hand.), and raisins.  We also used Orzo just to add something else.  (Rice would have been better since it starts with an R but we were out and figured finding the R in Orzo would suffice.)  We dropped the raisins in the soda, and PRESTO!  Dancing raisins! 

(Watch this video if the suspense is getting the best of you.)

• Fruit Flag - Yum.  That about sums up this activity!  

         I sliced the strawberries and bananas, and then put them, along 

         with the blueberries, into separate bowls.  I used a cheap, plastic 

         serving tray to place the fruit on and used wooden skewers to 

         separate the "stripes" of the flag so that they were more defined for 

         my daughter.  (I had to trim the skewers to make them fit, but they 

         were thin enough to cut.) 

          (Sorry about the quality of the pictures…photography is not my 

          forte!)

          Finally, the flag was finished and it was snack time.  I would have 

          taken an "after" picture, but there was nothing left! 

• Fireworks - I found this idea on Pinterest and actually got so carried away, that I forgot to snap any pictures of it!  This picture is from Michelle at CraftyMorning.   I wanted to show you what a simple and entertaining activity this is for kids.

          All you need is tape, bendable straws, paint, and paper.  Check out 

          Michelle's website (listed above) for a more detailed explanation of 

          this activity.  She has many more wonderful ideas, too, browse her 

          site if you have time.

• Fridays with Firefighters -  One of the local community fire stations holds "Fridays with Firefighters" during the summer from 10:30 to noon every Friday during the summer.  It's a free program that teaches kids and parents about fire prevention and safety.  Families are able to see inside a fire truck, talk to firefighters, spray a fire house, and learn about safety.  As if that isn't a treat in and of itself, frozen treats are available at the end of the visit!  A HUGE thanks to all that these men and women do!

We chose to read The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter and The Rainbow Fish by Marcus Pfister to work on identifying the R and F letters and sounds, and there was no shortage of finding these letters in the books!  I can't help but love this time of our day.  Sometimes it's not about the letters and language but more about the cuddles.  

 

Rockin' The Letters E and L

As any parent knows, when your child is up late, it is almost a guarantee that they will be up earlier than usual.  Yep.  That was just my morning.  A soft pitter patter of footsteps ran into my bedroom and a quiet voice whispered, "Mommy my belly hurts.  I'm hungry."   I looked at my alarm clock…two and a half hours early?!  (Insert silent sign here.)  It was going to be a long morning.  I dragged myself out of bed, grabbed my daughter a snack and juice, and then groggily  made myself a cup of coffee, my saving grace.  As did, I turned on PBS kids, and on came Super Why!  Shortly thereafter, I heard her yelling, "Mommy, it's an N, just like my name!"  It was a moment of pure awesomeness.

So over the last several days, we worked on the letters E and L.  I was really dreading the letter E and even put it off for a few days.  How would I explain that it can make more than one sound?  After a lot of thinking and hemming and hawing, I figured it out: My daughter is three.  She doesn't CARE!  Her excitement would be knowing that an elephant (her absolute favorite animal) started with the letter E.  Perfect.

We started with our letter book, and boy, did she load that page with elephant stickers.  She wasn't as excited about the letter L stickers: lions, and lizards, and llamas.  I don't blame her BUT I noticed she was doing a great job of referencing the upper and lower-case letters I wrote in her letter book while matching them to the letters on the sticker sheets!  We looked at our animal letter books, and then started a small letter activity.  This time, I drew the upper and lower case letters E and L and then cut tissue paper into small pieces.  I applied glue to the letters, and she began placing the pieces onto the letters.  So easy, but she loved it!

Our activities for these two letters were perfect for the rainy weather we had since we could do everything indoors!

• Egg Race!  I'm sure many of you have done something similar to this as kids.  You know, the one when you carry a spoon in a spoon, careful not to drop it, as you race to trade it off to a teammate or the finish line?  There are plenty of options for this including some cool, colorful ones from Amazon, but we managed to use plastic eggs from Easter and plastic spoons we had around the house.  The hallway made a perfect spot for our mess-less egg race.
• Earrings!  My daughter loves, loves, loves jewelry, so I ran with that idea and quickly drew a few faces on a piece of white paper and labeled the ears with an upper and lower-case E.  I grabbed my glue gun, beads, and pompoms and got ready to tackle this one.  After locating and labeling upper and lower-case Es, she was able to "help" me glue on the earrings.  I can't help but giggle at the girl with the purple pompoms earrings that look more like earmuffs!  A true Minnesotan apparently.

• Lollipops!  These were so easy to make and provided a lot of opportunities to practice the L sound!  I have done this before for birthdays, and it is so easy!  All you need is aluminum foil, parchment paper, Jolly Ranchers, and lollipop sticks.  Line a cookie sheet with aluminum foil and then parchment paper.  Unwrap the Jolly Ranchers (a great fine motor activity) and place three in a row on one end of the parchment paper.  Bake at 275 degrees for 6 minutes and remove from the oven.  Immediately place a lollipop stick on the melted candy and gently roll it back and forth until it is covered.  Let cool for 10 minutes and voila!  You can also reference the recipe here!

• Legos, legos, legos!  There was nothing complex about this activity.  We simply built with legos.  (I was Prince Charming…again.)  

• Llama Llama puzzle on the kitchen floor.  It was so much easier than the kitchen table since ours is on the smaller side.  Plus, the puzzle was reversible, so we took it apart without any worry of dropping pieces.

Our E and L books included Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss and Llama Llama Red Pajama by Anna Dewdney.  (I decided to go with Green Eggs and Ham because there was both an upper and lower-case letter that reoccurred in the book. )  Instead of reading Llama Llama Red Pajama, we watched it on YouTube to change things up a bit.  The video showed print, so I was able to pause it, and she could identify the letters.  You can find the video here.   

My little speech-language confession: I was excited to work on the letter L because my daughter has difficulty with that sound.  Even though it's not a developmental concern, I knew that the auditory bombardment piece would be beneficial.  After only two days of having fun with the L sound, she began using it in other words and during conversation.  My inner speech-language nerd was satisfied.

Letters N and I

Over the last few days, we've continued our adventure of letter learning with N and I, two more letters in my daughter's name.  Once I told her it was letter learning time, she enthusiastically shared, "Yay!  I love my letters."  I'd love to give myself a pat on the back for this this one, but I know better.  It's novel, at least that's what I suspect.  I hope that I'm wrong, but focusing on the glass behind half full, maybe it's exciting, fun, and engaging!

We started with our letter book, then the animal alphabet letter activity, and then made the letters with marshmallows and toothpicks.  I saw this somewhere on Pinterest a while back, and given my daughter's love of marshmallows, I figured it'd be a win-win. I was right.  She loved it!  I can only wish that I was that motivated by marshmallows!

Next we began our letter activities:

• Nail polish for a pedicure!  I'm not sure how, but my daughter talked me in to painting flowers on her toes.  (I gave it my best effort, but I'm pretty sure that there is no talent there!  Notice there is no picture posted?)  
• Noodle Necklaces...as if she doesn't already have enough necklaces.  It was a great motor skill for her, and I think the only way it could have been better was if I had pink noodles!  I couldn't complain about it either because all we needed was string and noodles.  Simple yet entertaining!
• Ice letters, well, actually, letters frozen in ice.  I placed the letters we have worked on so far (B, N, and I) in ice cube trays.  (I used smaller foam letters that I had kept at work for years but never used.  They worked perfectly!  I'm guessing that you can find similar letters at any craft store, or else you could cut your own out foam.)  Being that the letters were so light, they floated to the top.  After about two hours of freezing (after the ice started to form), I was able to push the letters down so they were not at the top of each cube.  We placed them in a bowl and then added water to speed up the melting process.  Once they started melting, she was able to peel the letters off of the ice.  This activity was a huge success! She asked to do it again tomorrow, so the letters are currently freezing again!

• We couldn't possibly work on the letter I without making Ice cream!  Several weeks ago, I made ice cream in a bag with a social skills group during the last week of school.  I used the same recipe, which you can find here.

After only one letter, she already knew what to do as soon as I mentioned it was time to read.  She grabbed her magnifying glass and we were off.  We read The Nose Book by Al Perkins, which obviously had no shortage of the upper and lower-case N!  Quite frankly, I wasn't sure we were going to finish the book with my daughter's dedication to find each and every N.  I can't help but love her persistence!  (There is also a free activity that you can download here if you'd like an extension activity to go with this book while still focusing on the letter N.) We also read If I Could Keep You Little by Marianne Richmond for the letter I.   This book always gets me but is such a great reminder to savor each moment spent with my daughter. 

 

To wrap things up, we took the BumBleBee and ladyBug cupcakes and delivered them to our Neighbors!  My favorite part?  My little helper's fingerprints all over the boxes! 

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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An Initial Plan for Learning Letters

I'm the kind of person who perseverates.  I stay up late working on whatever is on my mind.  I lie in bed thinking about it.  I can't attend to conversations because I'm planning everything out in my head.  In essence, I'm a little bit of a mess, but that's how I roll!

I've been giving more thought to my recent post about learning letters and some of the research behind it.  (Actually, that's all I've thought about.)  In my previous post, I mentioned that the 2001 article by Wood and McLemore shared instructional strategies for teaching early literacy.  I'd like to share a few of them with you.

Sing songs that target the alphabet or specific sounds.  DLTK has a list of free letter songs and rhymes.  Heidi Songs is a DVD that has a song for every letter of the alphabet.  It also includes the sound of the letter and letter formation.
Read alphabet books.  There is no shortage of alphabet books!  Katrina Lybbert  and Anna from The Measured Mom share lists of books by letter.  A few that we love to read in our house include Chicka Chicka Boom Boom by Bill Martin, Jr. and John Archambault; Shiver Me Letters: A Pirate ABC by June Sobel; Peanut Butter and Jellyfishes by Brian P. Clearly; Alphabet Mystery by Audrey Wood; and  and Dr. Seuss's ABC: An Amazing Alphabet Book.
Focus on letters that have special meaning.   Letters in your child's name, the beginning letter of a
favorite animal or food are great places to start.
Use games that focus on letters and sounds.  Games such as Boggle Jr., Spell It Out!, Spot It! Alphabet, Super Why or Eric Carle's ABC games, puzzles, or anything you already have at home are perfect!  I also found some great online resources: PBS Kids, ABCya!, and eLearning Industry which provides a list of 14 free alphabet iPad apps for kids.
Keep plastic, magnetic, or wood letters available for your child to manipulate.

After reflecting on everything the last 24 hours, I've decided to begin with the letters in my daughter's name.  I'm collecting my thoughts and resources for the letter B: babies, bubbles, books, balls, bananas, and yes…bacon (one of her favorite foods)!   We'll see where the first day takes us!

Now to end with a little humor...

The Complexity of Letter-Sound Acquisition

It's finally summer break, and I get to spend the entire summer with my three-year-old daughter.  I'm so lucky to have this time, and I want to make the most of it, finding a balance between laughing and learning.  Somewhere among vacations, swimming lessons, princess tea parties, trips to the park, baking (oh, and shopping, too-per my daughter's request!), I already know that summer is going to breeze by, but I'm determined to help her begin learning the letters of the alphabet. 

Two days after school let out,  I started to create a plan…start with A and end with Z.  I like order, structure, organization, and alphabetical order seemed only logical.  So, I prepared several crafts to accompany the first few letters of the alphabet, each placed in its own, distinctly labeled plastic bag, ready to go.  That's when I started reading a bit of research, which now has me reconsidering my approach.   Please bare with me through this post.  I PROMISE there is purpose to it!

When parents talk about their children "knowing the alphabet" or teachers share that their students "know the letters of the alphabet," those phrases can touch on a variety of skills.  Do they mean that the letters can be receptively identified or expressively identified?  Are they talking about upper-case letters or lower-case letters?  Does letter knowledge mean sound recognition or sound production?  

A 2001 article by Janice Wood and Bronwyn McLemore published in The Florida Reading Quarterly: Critical Components of Early Literacy - Knowledge of the Letters of the Alphabet and Phonic Instruction, provides great insight as well as instructional strategies for teaching early literacy (which I will talk about in a later post).  This is where I learned that teaching a "letter of the week" would not be as beneficial as I originally thought.  Not only would I be presenting letters at a slow rate, but they would not necessarily be connected to literacy by doing oodles of fun crafty "stuff."   The article shared that children learn best when the letters are not taught in isolation but rather when connected to meaningful reading and/or writing activities. 

A second article published in 1998 by Child Development: The Foundations of Literacy: Learning the Sounds of Letters (R. Treiman, R. Tincoff, K. Rodriguez, A. Mouzaki, and D. Francis) looked at children's knowledge of letter sounds and names, and then explored factors that made sound-letter correspondence easier to learn than others.  YIKES! What in the world does that mean?  It's actually simpler than it sounds.  In a nutshell, a child's ability to learn a sound is related to properties of a letter's name.  There are three main properties of a letter's name:  

1.  the letter's sound is at the beginning of its name such as D and V
2.  the letter's sound is at the end of its name such as M and L
3.  the letter's sound is not in its name such as Y and H

The findings revealed that the letter sound at the beginning of its name (#1) was the best determination of letter-sound knowledge, followed by the letter sound at the end of its name (#2), and finally, the letter sound not in its name (#3).

After digesting this information, I will definitely be making some changes.  Ultimately, I have the summer to things out.  In the grand scheme of things, what truly matters is that I'm spending time with my daughter, and any type of learning is valuable.  

I'll be sharing my ideas in the next day or two…just as soon as I figure it out myself!  If you have any thoughts or ideas,  I'd love to hear them!  I'm just learning as a I go.