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Alphabet Activities for Preschool: Heart Puzzles

2013
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Today I am teaming up with +Jamie Reimer from hands on: as we grow and +Jackie Higgins from Ready Set Read for a Valentine’s Day for Kids Google Plus Hangout!  We’ll be sharing Valentine’s Day themed letter activities for preschoolers–it will be so much fun!

Alphabet Activities for PreschoolIt will air LIVE both here and on my G+ profile page at 3pm EST today.  But no worries if you miss it–you can check back to either place anytime you want to watch the video!

As you can see in the video the heart puzzles are super easy to make!  Just cut out a bunch of heart shapes from red cardstock and cut in half.  Then write upper and lowercase letters or word chunks on each half for the kids to match up.

letter activities for preschool: heart puzzles

More ways to play with Broken Heart Letter Puzzles:

  • Match the uppercase and lowercase letter together
  • Identify the sound each letter makes
  • Find an object in the room that starts with the letter in the puzzle
  • Tell the preschooler a word, have him/her find the letter for the first or last sound in the word
  • Make new words with word chunks and consonants or blends.
  • Create a heart word sort with one word chunk.  Tell the kids to change the first letter and read the new word.  Repeat.
  • Write, stamp, type, or sticker the new words using various materials such as sand, paper, contact paper, etc.

This Valentine’s Day for Kids activity is part of a week of LIVE Hangouts on Air on G+!  Be sure to check the full schedule for all of the #vdayfun!

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Fire Hose Fact Practice Game

2012
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My first grader needs to work on her addition fact speed as part of her homework this month.  We also have been talking about fire safety and today it occurred to me to combine the two–after all what better reason to go quickly than a fire?

I wrote some of the sums the 6 year old was working on the fence with sidewalk chalk and drew flames around them.  I also wrote letters and sight words in ”flames” so my 2 and 4 year olds could play too.

 My first grader had lots of fun “putting out” the correct addition fact answers!

The 4 year old did a great job finding sight words to hose off!

And the little one loved squirting the letters!

Then when they were done they used their hoses to clean the rest of the flames off the fence.

Definitely a great way to have fun while learning math facts!  What do your kids like to do to memorize facts?  This is a new thing for my first grader and we will be looking for more fun ways to practice.

Linking up to:

 Kids Co-op

Filed Under: Learning Activities, Math Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Create a Food Themed ABC Book

2012
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We were so excited to see that this month’s Virtual Book Club for Kids author was Lois Ehlert!  We have long-loved her vibrant illustrations and her focus on food and animals and were happy to discover books of hers we had never read before. However, it was an old favorite that we spent the most time reading.  Eating the Alphabet definitely resonated with the kids.  

So we decided to create our own version of the ABC story.  The kids searched through old food and recipe magazines and cut out food for each letter of the alphabet.  My two year old was extremely excited to practice using scissors and they all did a great job working together.  It was so much fun watching them call out the different food they had found for each letter–it truly was a group project.

Eventually we’ll laminate in the pages and bind it into a book for our home library, but first we have to finish it.  There are still some letters we don’t have food for.  Although we did steal Lois Ehlert’s idea for X, xigua, the Chinese word for watermelon!

For more food fun with Eating the Alphabet check out The Good Long Road‘s Meatless Monday: Eating the Alphabet from A to Z!

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Create an Alphabet Puppet Theater

2012
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We had a ton of fun with July’s Summer Virtual Book Club for Kids’ author Audrey Wood.  And yes, I know it’s already August. Better late than never!

There are so many great books by Audrey Wood and her husband Don, but we became obsessed with the series of books based on the alphabet that she did with her son Bruce.  Alphabet Adventure, Alphabet Mystery, and Alphabet Rescue follow the adventures of a set of precocious lowercase letters.

In the first book, Alphabet Adventure the letters prepare to go to school and become Charley’s alphabet.  Then Alphabet Mystery and Alphabet Rescue chronicle the escapades the lowercase letters get into.  All three of my kids loved seeing the lowercase letters personified in the story and asked for our magnet letters so they could act the stories out.

They were having so much fun with the letters we decided to make letter puppets to use in a puppet show!  We couldn’t find a set of already cut lowercase letters so one of my friends cut out a set for us on her Cricut.  Then I laminated the letters and hot glued them to craft sticks.

And the kids got to work on the theater.  I got a little carried away freehanding the opening and it was too low for the kids to sit behind.  We compensated by placing the cardboard on top of our train table, but you may want to only cut yours half as tall if you decide to make one for your house.

After they finished the puppet theater they made some additional puppets to help them tell the story.  I loved listening to the three of them work together on this!  Creating a puppet show based on a book is a fantastic way to promote story comprehension and pretend play.

We even had a storage pocket on the front for all of our puppets!

Then is was showtime!  After a little bit of discussion the kids got busy telling us the story of Audrey Wood and Bruce Wood’s Alphabet Rescue.

I was amazed at how well they remembered the details of the story and how they worked together to retell it to my husband and me.

We have had a ton of fun with our lowercase letter puppets and they have been the stars of subsequent original stories.  The kids have loved playing with the Charley’s Alphabet books and the letter puppets and have been developing many skills in the process such as letter identification, phonemic awareness, retelling, comprehension, and story structure.

We can’t wait for next month’s (okay this month’s) Summer Virtual Book Club featuring Kevin Henkes!

Check out all the other fun activities you can do with Audrey Woods’ books:

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Filed Under: ABC Activities, Crafts, Learning Activities, Reading, Writing Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Letter P Pancake Themed Activities

2012
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After school got out for the summer my oldest went to camp each morning for a week.  The younger two were bummed they were missing out on all the fun so we invited some of their friends over for a pancake themed play date!

Everyone wore their pajamas to get into the letter P and pancake spirit and we started off the fun by making pink pig noses! (Did you catch all the P words so far?) We talked about the sounds animals make and how letters make sounds too.  Instead of oinking they pretended that they were pigs that said, “Puh!” and had lots of fun puh-ing around the pretend pig pen.

*Note: I wrote puh with the uh because it was the closest I could get to spelling the P sound.  When making the P sound you actually want to make sure your jaw is dropping and there isn’t any “uh” sound at all.  It’s more of a lip popping sound and motion.  Teaching kids the correct way to make each sound helps them as they start to put the sounds together to read and spell words.*

After being little piggies they were ready to read!  We read If You Give a Pig a Pancake by Laura Numeroff which is one of our favorites.  The kids love to predict what the pig will ask for next and as you can tell by the title there are lots of P words to play with.  After we read and discussed the story the kids got to put their noses back on and “puh” when we found the letter P.

If You Give a Pig a Pancake is a circular story, the plot line literally comes full circle, so what better way to sequence the story events than on a round pancake!  They all did a fantastic job of recalling story events and then placing them in order–such a great book to use to work on these skills.

By this time the kids were ready for a snack so we painted some pancakes to eat!  My husband premade a bunch of pancakes for the kids the night before and they used a mix of food coloring and 2% milk to paint designs on the cold pancakes.

Then I put them in the oven to warm and dry the designs while they kept painting.  I love how fun the colors look on the pancakes–we usually only paint toast and I can’t wait to do this again.  It would be so much fun for a birthday breakfast!

While they ate the 4 year olds played with our word chunk sliders.  The first word the “an” chunk slider makes is pan so it was perfect to start with.  They had fun sliding the stick to make and read the different “an” words and came back to them later to work with other word families too.

Then it was time for some games!  They had a blast with the pancake relay.

But the pancake toss was much more fun for me as a spectator!  It was hysterical to watch them practice their gross motor skills by trying to toss and catch the pancakes.  There were definitely a lot of giggles during this one!

After some games we practiced writing Ps a couple ways and then turned the letter P into a picture!  The 2 and 3 year olds made the P into anything they wanted and the 4 year olds turned their Ps into pictures of P words–including a great big pizza!

Then it was lunch time!  More pancakes, of course.  Each of them got a pancake pig, scrambled eggs, OJ, berries, syrup, and even some mini-chocolate chip pancakes!

 After lunch we had time for one last game–pillow case races! There are so many fun things you can do with pancakes and the letter P.

What other If You Give a Pig a Pancake activities have you done?

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Lasso the Moon

Filed Under: Birthday Parties, Food, Learning Activities, Reading, Themed Parties, Writing Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish Activities

2012
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I love Dr. Seuss! He is the rock star of the reading world. I could go on and on and on. (And I’m sure I will over the next few weeks!) In our house, and in my classroom when I was teaching, as soon as Valentine’s Day is over the countdown is on – to his birthday, of course!

In other online circles I am the Primary School Topic Editor at Suite101.com where I write about teaching strategies and lesson plans and fun stuff like that. Right now I am in the middle of a lesson for The Lorax [Random House, 1971] and have all things Seuss on the brain.  (I’ve even been speaking in rhyme…)

One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish by Dr. Seuss [Random House, 1960]

Anyway, since I have Seuss on my mind I thought I’d share some of my favorite One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish activities with you all!

(FYI, The photo above is an affiliate link.)

Red Fish Blue Fish Math Patterns

So fun for preschool and kindergarteners!  Use colored Goldfish crackers to teach kids about ABAB, AAB, ABB, and ABC math patterns.  Demonstrate each pattern and have the kids continue it.  The cool thing about doing this activity at home is that everyone can play.  My 2 year old followed along with us while we were making the patterns together. Then, when the big kids were creating their own patterns, she sorted her fish into color piles.

Red Fish Blue Fish Jell-O Bowls

Swedish fish in blue Jello-O is a classic Dr. Seuss treat.  Easy to make and full of sugar – sure to be a hit with the kids!  (Especially mine who are always complaining they don’t get as many treats as their friends!)

Anything I’m missing?  Leave the link in the comments.  I’d love to add it to my Dr. Seuss Day Pinterest board!

Filed Under: ABC Activities, Crafts, Food, Learning Activities, Math, Reading Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Letter Matching with Hearts

2012
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Last year my awesome sister sent the kids this fun and educational letter game!  She called it Lower Case Love and made it by printing each lower case letter on pink and red paper.  Then, being the superstar that she is, she cut them into heart shapes and even laminated them.  (Like I said, superstar.)

And, of course, being the former kindergarten teacher she is, she also sent game suggestions.

Here’s what we play:

  1. Hunting for Hearts.  Each kid grabs one of our many buckets and tries to find as many hearts as he or she can.  We basically use this as the start of our activity because they love looking for them!
  2. Lower Case Letter Match.  Preschoolers don’t even know they are practicing letter identification when they find and match the corresponding red and pink letters together.  This is fun to do after a hunt.  Sometimes I even only hide certain letters I think one of them may need extra practice with.
  3. Letter Memory.  Choose a bunch of letter pairs to play with and place them face down on a table.  The kids take turns turning over letters to find matches.  You know the drill.
  4. Making Words.  Last year only my PreK-er was able to put the letters together to form words, but this year the 3 1/2 year old was able to play too.  So fun!  For him, my kindergartener made CVC words and had him sound them out, helping him when he got stuck.  He did very well and it was so exciting to see them working together like that.  My kindergartener then tried to see how many sight words she could make off her word wall.

This game can be easily adapted to practice numbers, words, and even be made with different holiday shapes.  What do you do to add a little learning into your holiday fun?

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