Fun with Letters

Here are several variations of the letter activities we do along with Learn with Homer and Letter and Sound Recognition pages. Most can be done without any prep work and with items you most likely have on hand. We focus on one letter/sound a week and refer to it as our “special letter”.

Letter Hunt – Logan walks around the house with his magnifying glass to spy the special letter (occasionally, his treasure map helps us too). We look at food products in the kitchen, a calendar, labels on his toy bins, the mail that comes that day, etc. When Logan finds the special letter, he gets a jewel to put in his treasure box. Then when he is done his letter hunt, he counts the jewels to see how many letters he found that day. I found these jewels at the dollar store in the floral arrangement department. We use them all the time!

A Tisket-a-Tasket – “A green and yellow basket. I wrote a letter to my friend and on the way I dropped it…A little boy picked it up and put it in his pocket.” This nursery rhyme implies that a letter (mail) was dropped, but we pretend it’s our special letter that was dropped around the house. Logan knows where we have alphabet collections (in flashcards, fridge magnets, foam bath letters, building blocks, puzzles, and games). He goes to the collections and looks through to find the special letter. Then he makes his own collection of the special letter.

A Tisket-a-Tasket Variation – We do this activity together and help each other find the letters. Logan uses the special letter of the week and writes a different special letter for me to find. What makes this version interesting for Logan is that some alphabet collections have missing letters, so someone can win by finding more letters than the other person. Although, I think he’s catching on to which letters are missing. I seem to get the short end of the stick when we play these days.

Sound Search and Find – This activity focuses on the initial letter sound of objects around the house. Logan gathers objects, usually toys, that start with the sound of our special letter. We did N last week and he brought a knight to his collection. I congratulated him for finding the correct sound and then we talked about how some words have a silent letter in front. He later found a gnome, which was very helpful in reinforcing silent letters!

Here are 2 more ways to use the letter mats from the Letter and Sound Recognition package:

Do you have letter and sound activities you do with your little one? Please share in the comments! I’d love to hear more ideas.

50% off New Products!

The store I buy the majority of clipart from has a very generous sale on new products. I've decided to extend the same sale to all of you! My Teachers Pay Teachers store now offers 50% off new products for the first 48 hours. Please follow my store so that you can get an e-mail when I post new products. This way you can be sure to get your 50% off.

Since I recently posted a new product Letter and Sound Recognition, I will re-release it in the upcoming days to give you the 50% off for the first 48 hours. Remember to follow my store to avoid missing the sale!

Springing Ahead in ABCs

The upcoming time change has reminded me that I’ve fallen behind on my blog posts – I’m happy to be back from the hiatus. During that time, I’ve shifted some of my focus from second grade down to Pre-K. My little guy is eager for schoolwork and has put in his requests for what kind of worksheets and activities he would like to do. Here’s a look at what we’ve been up to:

Learn with Homer App

If you want an educational app for letter and sound recognition, learning to read, and reading comprehension, this is it. I can only begin to tell you how much Logan loves using it and learning from it. This program focuses on connecting letter sound to upper and lower case letters. Logan’s prior knowledge of letter names was helpful, but now the initial connection he makes when he sees a letter is the sound it makes. It also teaches sight words and allows your child to interact by recording answers and letter sounds. Fantastic! Worth the subscription. Or you can do what I did and wait to get a code e-mailed to you for up to 60% off. Note: I was not paid or perked to recommend this app.

Letter and Sound Recognition

With my 3½ year old in mind, I’ve created a letter and sound recognition package. Every alphabet letter comes with four worksheets:

1.     A colour letter mat with the letter, sound, and 2 words/pictures beginning with the letter.

2.     A black and white letter mat with directional arrows on letter, sound, and 2 words/pictures beginning with the letter.

3.     A practice page to find pictures beginning with the sound, find the upper and lower case letter, and trace the letter.

4.     A more challenging practice page to draw a picture of something that begins with that letter, an upper case/lower case sort or hidden picture, and printing practice.

Follow the cover picture above to find the printables. Logan loves to find different ways to make or find the letter we are working on. There are so many variations that I will have to write a post about it…sooner than later.

Insert Owl Pun Here

There’s an entire parliament of owl puns overused by the human population, so I’ve decided to respectfully withhold a pun-ny title for today. After completing the Fall Changes unit in Theme Studies (our time period for Science/Social Studies), we go on to learn all about owls. These two units not only go perfectly with the time of year, but also make it easy to provide a smooth transition from one unit to the next.

I like to keep my “theme” units in duo-tangs with a quick one-page overview of the unit for easy reference. All of the worksheets, printables, and activities are in sheet protectors following the order of the lessons from the unit plan. Here’s a copy of my owl overview plan:

As you can see in the plan, I focus on 6 owl species: Barn Owls, Burrowing Owls, Great Grey Owls, Great Horned Owls, Screech Owls, and Snowy Owls. (Side note: Snowy Owls have spent the past two winters in a farmer’s field in my city! It’s been incredible to see with my own eyes these northern birds of prey outside of captivity.) We focus on labelling the parts of the owl, and finding out what the specific owl eats, its habitat, and an interesting fact. The kiddos love to participate in the research aspect of our lesson for each owl. We use a projector with Internet access to look up the sound of the owls and videos of the owls hunting and flying. And the books from the library help us learn how to use a table of contents and index to find specific information. These are the resources I have used for this unit:

New to the owl unit is a play-based learning activity on owlets. I’ll give you a hint for what we are going to do:

Also, I found these at Ikea last year, (the owl is a hand puppet):

Of course, no owl unit is complete without some pellet dissection! I ordered box of barn owl pellets from Owl Brand Discovery Kits (link: http://www.obdk.com). It came from the states to Canada in really good time – although that is expected these days. I was really happy with the product – if you can say that about something an owl has coughed up like a hairball…Add the website to your list of resources, it’s been updated with great owl videos. This is a messy activity. If you have butcher paper or newspaper, lay it down EVERYWHERE. I like to use butcher paper so I can draw a big circle as a work area for each student/group and write their name on it. More often than not filling out observations and dissecting takes longer than one class period.

The kiddos do a Before Dissection Observation Report, match the bones they find to a bone chart while dissecting, and an After Dissection Report on their findings.

For a preview of my full owl unit, check out the link below.

How To in Blogger: Posts in your Pages

This tutorial is as much for me as it is for you. To me, using Blogger is similar to driving to a place a friend told me about with very limited directions. I miraculously arrive at that location (after many wrong turns), sing a celebratory song in my car, and then realize I have no idea how to get home... Thanks, Blogger. After combining 2 complicated tutorials I came across, I had finally created a tab that links to selected posts. I was all set to share that complicated route with you, when I discovered Blogger has a shortcut. Thanks, Blogger!

Here are the simple SHORTCUT directions for making PAGES redirect to select POSTS. Meaning – as you post, attach a label that will connect it to the other posts you want in this tab. For example, all of my tutorial posts are labeled “tech”. My new tab is “Tips for TPT”. After I complete the following steps, when I click on my tab “Tips for TPT” it will show my blog with all of the posts labeled “tech”.

1. View blog. Go to the navigation bar on the right hand side. There should be a screwdriver and wrench symbol. Click on it.

2. Click on the + Add External Link

3. Make your page/tab title. Enter this code for the URL:

http://YOUR BLOG ADDRESS/search/label/YOUR LABEL

4. Save Link. You can rearrange the order of your tabs at this stage if you’d like. Save again, and you’re done.

Click on my Tips for TPT tab to see how I linked to "tech" labeled posts. Happy Blogging!