ALPHABET

Everett and I have been working on the alphabet together. I started this a while ago, but he quickly lost interest and wouldn't really try to identify letters. My hope was that if we practiced the sounds, it would really help his speech development, but it turned out okay--we found other ways to practice sounds, and I decided to wait a little while longer before going over the alphabet again.

These are his two favorite activities that we've done. The best thing is, they cost next to nothing!

He loves it when I put letters on the floor with masking tape. There are a multitude of games we can do with these letters, including "tickling" a certain letter with a feather, walking on the lines to trace the shape, drawing along the tape to make the shape of the letter (any excuse to draw on the floor, right?), or playing "musical letters". He has been having a lot of fun and mostly just likes squashing whichever letter I ask him to (he does like making the sound too, but it isn't as much fun).

Our next step is for me to make a sound and have him find the correct letter. Also, I want him to have a firmer grasp of lowercase letters since those really are the most common ones. Right now he knows them pretty well, but I'm hoping he will get them all down.

The next project was one I took a long time to finish, because I am a huge slacker and just didn't get it out. It was very easy--six vinyl strips sewn onto a heavy blue vinyl, and sectioned off into pockets. The binding is ribbon. It doesn't take long to do, and anyone could do it, which was great because I am still trying to find my way around a sewing machine.


Throw in a bunch of cheap 3x5 cards (because I want them easily replaceable), and Everett was in heaven. He looks at it every night when he goes to bed and he loves to go pick out some letters to "play" with. In each pocket is three cards: One with both upper and lowercase, and one each of the uppercase and lowercase letter.

So far we've used them to play a seek-and-find game, go fish, matching, and a couple of others. Eventually we will add in picture cards that represent the sounds the letters make. Even more eventually, we can use the pockets to make words out of the letters. The main thing I've learned with this is to make small changes to the same game so he thinks he's doing something different. Before I know it, that won't work anymore, and I don't know what I'll do then!


Does anyone have any other ideas that would work with these cards? I could always use more. What have you done with your kids?