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Teaching Letters/Preschool Activities
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I am just beginning homeschooling my DS3. I realize that character building, reading good books, and nature study are the most important things but outside of that I’m working with him on his letters. First of all, am I forgetting anything?
My other question is… Have any of you done some sort of “letter of the week” type thing? I read an alphabet book to him occassionally and we (try to get through) an alphabet puzzle where you match a letter with a picture of what starts with that letter. He knows most of his letters but not all of them. Some are confusing to him (like L and J) and he doesn’t like that the lower-case of a letter doesn’t look like the upper-case one. I’m not sure what else I could do to help him.
I had the idea of the “Letter of the Week” thinking it may help to focus on one letter at a time and also to help me focus so maybe I could think of fun things to do with him each day. I’m not a craft-type person but maybe he’d like to do things like that. This is stemming from feeling like he needs more “activities” (like he would get in a *real* preschool) Instead of just hours of free-play.
Any ideas on this?
TIA!
Dana
The letter of the week idea is a good one. We actually had a Sunday School curriculum for preschoolers with that theme, and we did the uppercase letter one week and the lowercase letter the next. That way, our curriculum lasted for an entire year.
He’ll get used to the idea of upper and lowercase letters as he sees more and more printed material and learns to read words. As you are reading to him, you can point out, “Oh, there’s our friend, Uppercase A–and there’s his little brother, Lowercase a–both doing their important jobs of helping us read!”
One thing we did that was a lot of fun was the “Mystery Letter Box.” I took an empty shoebox–a big one, from boots or men’s shoes–and I covered/decorated the box and lid. Just make sure you can still open the lid. I cut a three-sided door panel to bend inward into one of the short sides of the box bottom. Then, every week (or 2-3 times per week) you put a few things that begin with the sound of the letter of the week in the box. Put the lid back on and have your son reach into the box from the side door to see if he can guess what is in there. Remind him of the beginning sound of the letter of the week. When he guesses, either he can pull it out of the door (if it’s small enough) or you can lift the lid to take it out without exposing the other items.
Conversely, you could have him go around the house looking for appropriate things to put into the box to show dad later. Or how about a Letter of the Week Scavenger Hunt, where you place the appropriate things with the letter attached around the house or yard, and he has to find them.
I just realized that we did things a little differently for letters like Qq with more difficult to find objects. For Q, we put a picture of a queen in the box and just let them guess what the picture might be. Then we took it out and told them the letter and sound. Instead of using the box, we played games like “hide and seek the queen” where we took turns hiding the queen picture in the room then finding it. If you found it, you had to say the sound and point to the letter Q which was on the picture.
Wow Sue_mom23! Those are great ideas! How creative! Thanks for that! Is there an online resource with more ideas like that?
Thanks a ton!
I used this cute little program called ABC-Fun 123 which I downloaded from Shirley’s website, it costs about $22 now I think. Here is the link to have a look, http://www.shirleys-preschool-activities.com/abc-fun.html
It is a letter of the week program but you can adjust to how you want to do it. She gives lots of ideas to do each week for the letter you are focusing on, incl. books to read together, Bible stories to read,food to cook and others. It’s fun and low-key. I started off just doing the letters in my son’s name to start with and we stuck the letter sheets that you make (with her templates) on the wall to make his name. It’s very tactile too, like you glue crushed nuts onto the letters for N and egg shells for E etc. Sometimes I changed the ‘theme’ to suit what my son was interested in at the time, for eg. we cut out pictures of Thomas the Tank Engine for the letter T so decorate his page.
Here are some Letter of the Week sites:
Letter of the Week from Confessions of a Homeschooler ($10 for the download) http://www.confessionsofahomeschooler.blogspot.com
Brightly Beaming Resources http://www.letteroftheweek.com
Totally Tots http://www.totallytots.blogspot.com
A cool resource for the Alphabet (if you don’t mind fairies, and doing some editing) is here…
the editing is it introduces Catholic Saints, I’f I’m not mistaken. But there is a lot of good ideas other than that.
http://ebeth.typepad.com/serendipity/along-the-alphabet-path-1.html
we’ve done a similar thing to the letter scavenger hunt – we have the big Lauri lace and link letters and I’ll put them on the floor and get them to find objects that start with that letter, get them to go stand on __ letter, and I’ll mix up the objects and get them to sort them back out to the right letter. The uppercase and lowercase will lock together (like a puzzle) and will only fit with the one that matches – this helps. We also have the Lauri puzzles of uppercase and lowercase letters – we’ll take them out and get them to match the capitals to the lowercase and then put them in the puzzle (I have twins, so this is a good doubles activity!). I really like the activity cards and Lauri toys from My Father’s World – it helps me not have to come up with as many ideas for my small two while I am working with the older one (however, I did order most of my Lauri toys from Amazon and saved a bit – and I got others in addition to what MFW uses). Other than those, we “letter hunt” when we are reading books, looking at signs on buildings, etc. My boys also really like to make letters out of pretzels, carrots, etc. 🙂 I did make some of the wood pieces like Handwriting without tears uses and we make the letters with those too. That’s all I can think of off the top of my head. We don’t do a letter a week (though I think that could be helpful) but I just have a good idea of which ones they have down pat, and try to exercise the ones that they struggle a bit more with. HTH
This website is loaded with all kinds of things. She has planned a letter of the week kind if thing, but has given lots of activities to choose from for each letter that covers math, science, social studies, art, snacks, etc. She also has math and more… And it’s FREE! =)
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