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.