Everett Projects

Everett has a major thing for animals. Something about them just fascinates him, and so it is something he loves to talk about. For Christmas, I went to Michael's and got a couple of their animal "toobs" for a great deal. Now he has a bunch of little animals that he loves getting out and naming. He knows everything from a wildebeest to a skunk to a crocodile. If you ask him what a Hyena says, he will reply "hee hee hee." It is really fun for me to be involved in something he is so interested in.

Not all of the animals are here. There are a lot, but he has fun with them.

I have been meaning for some time to begin some sort of scheduled "learning time" with Everett. Maybe I'm being completely ridiculous, but I think it will be beneficial for both of us to have this time together. I think he enjoys the one-on-one time more than anything.

I have wanted to start doing letters with Everett. Right now, he has zero interest in letters, numbers, or colors. This is fine. I do not have a problem with this because he is still so very young, but learning them is something I thought would be fun for us to do together. After all, this is sort of my "specialty" if you will. I don't have a degree and have never had a "real" job, but my favorite job I had was working as the kindergarten literacy coordinator at a Provo Elementary school. We did lots of activities with the letters of the alphabet. It is different gearing this toward a two year old instead of a five year old, but it is still pretty fun for me.

At first I was hesitant to get started on the letters and sounds because Everett still doesn't use all the sounds in his speech, but then I realized that if we begin to go over letters and sounds, this may actually improve his speech and get him more comfortable with verbalizing all those words that I just know are floating around in his little head. So if this is all he takes away from our letter studies, I will be a happy mom.

Our first letter was the letter A. Technically there are letters you should start with--the most common ones, but I decided to start at the beginning with a letter that I knew Everett could pronounce.

Our activity was really simple. We took a side of a cardboard box and cut out the letters. Then we took markers and colored them. This part surprised me--I took the marker and guided Everett's hand while I traced the letter and said "up, down, across". I wasn't trying to get him to write it; I just wanted to familiarize him with the shape of the letter. BUT, from then on, Everett would carefully choose a marker and say to himself "up, down, across" while he tried to follow my lines. After he was done, we glued little letters onto the bigger letters (Everett also has a thing for glue). I thought about doing things that start with the letter A, but he is too young to understand that concept, so I just decided to have him glue the mini letters on the respective larger letter to reinforce everything. When we were all finished, Everett got to choose a place to tape them on the wall. This is really effective for him because he is always so proud of the things he does. He was very excited to show Papa what he had made.

Everett ripped all the little a's off, so now they just look like random orange pieces.

The plan right now is to do a different letter every week. We'll do different activities each week with the same letter, but the most important thing to me is that we point out letters on things around us. I want him to begin to understand (maybe not now, but someday) that letters are everywhere, and that letters are important.