Since the lockdown has started I have been working on alphabet recognition with M. Slowly it’s settling down on her and she can recognise many letters now ; Letter E being her favorite. I plan the activities to be more hands on so that she never gets bored. We do worksheets too but that won’t hardly take more than 10 minutes a day. She’s more of a kinesthetic learner so I have to make sure there’s some physical activities involved too.
If you’ve missed previous letter of the week activities read them below.
Letter A /Letter B /Letter C /Letter D / Letter E / Letter F
Here’s our plan for Letter G week
Day 1
🔸Object Bin
To start off our Letter G week as always we explored the object bin. I have Giraffe, Goat, Grape, Glasses, Girl, Gloves in our bin. You can include whatever you find at home. Hands on exploration is a great way to learn vocabulary.
🔸Letter Collage
Print out the block letter G from here. Use a glue stick and glitters ( G for glitters) to make this sparkly letter collage.
🔸 Gross Motor Letters
It’s always important to bring the alphabets back together during any letter of the week programs. We played a simple gross motor game with letters from A-E. You can add more if the child can handle.
Using masking tape I made this block letters on the floor. Then I asked them to follow a variety of instructions such as ‘ jump to—‘ , ‘ slide to —‘, ‘ hop to —‘ etc. They had so much fun and it was a brain break for my eldest too from his first grade work.
🔸 Gum ball printables
I used these printables for some table work. We used round office stickers to cover the dots this time. She loves dot markers too and I can’t stress enough how amazing tool it’s for toddlers.
I also used this gum ball counting mat to practice numbers. I slid them in dry erase sheet and wrote the numbers for her to put that many clear color counters to add as gum balls.
Day 2
🔸 Book : The three billy goats gruff
Unfortunately we do not have access to our library and hence I have to rely on the read alouds in you tube. This is a classic story that I don’t want them to miss out. We also saw the animated version of that in the link below.
Three Billy Goat Gruff – You Tube
🔸 Floating Letter
A super simple activity with just two materials – dry erase marker and a shallow tray. First draw the letters on the tray using any color dry erase marker. Then slowly pour a cup of water to the tray and you can see the gentle thrust of water lift the letters up and float them around.
🔸 Paper bag Goats
Inspired by the story three billy goat gruffs we spent an afternoon making three paper bag goats.
Supplies needed:
- Brown paper bag
- construction paper
- Brown/ Yellow/ Pink paint
At first I cut all the pieces out – head, horns, ears and tongue. As I didn’t use any template it was a pretty tedious process. Then I let them paint the pieces with markers, kwikstix, crayons etc. Brown for head & ears, yellow for horns and pink for tongue
Once dried it’s time to glue them on the paper bag as shown below. We used school glue and used staples for some pieces to stay secure.
🔸 Goat printables
We love these themed printables from Carisa’s blog. They are free and you can download it here. We used dot page, stamping, coloring and shape cut & paste activity pages.
Day 3
🔸Vocabulary Cards
These free printable cards are from Themeasuredmom. I spread out one set of cards on the floor and slid the other set into the pockets of a clear pocketed dice. Then they roll the dice and pick the picture that they got. At the end whoever has more will be the winner. They were so fond of this game and I lost track of how many times we actually played this one.
🔸Grapes Sculpture
This is a good fine motor practice that you can do during a snack time. Just use some toothpicks and grapes to build any freeform structures. But beware if your kids are like mine who just loove snacks chances are it might actually end up in their tummies 😊. We tried some simple shapes before they decided to eat them all up.
🔸 G for Grapes Craft
Print the free small letter g from here and cut it out.
Using purple dot markers I let her stamp all over the paper. Again in another small piece of paper she stamped using green dot marker which I used to cut out the stem.
Punch out some small circles out of the purple paper. I cut them freehanded and then let her glue on the letter g. At the end I added the stem on top to finish the craft.
🔸 Dot marker page
We used some pom pom magnets to design this grape dot marker page. Make sure to do it on a cookie sheet. That little grape is from our velcro fruit set which was her favourite.
Day 4
🔸 Book: Goodnight Gorilla
This was M’s favourite book from the time she was little. It has minimal text but a catchy story perfect for bedtime.
🔸 Giraffe spots Dice game
I printed off this free giraffe printable and wrote numbers 1-3 on it. Then we rolled a paper dice that have 1-3 on it. She covered whatever number she rolled using dot stickers. You could write any number that you want to work on and call it out for them to cover up.
🔸 G is for Giraffe
This craft is a free printable set from here. Download them here and follow the instructions to make the craft.
🔸 Giraffe color clip cards
These free color clip cards are from here. She has many giraffe themed activities and we tried the clip cards alone. Use some colored clothespin to mark the right color of giraffe. Some colors were pretty confusing to her but she could do the green, purple and blue.
Day 5
🔸 Letter G mini book
We use this mini book to learn some D words and she loves the cute little book. And after reading she always put them in her backpack. Seems like she’s ready for preschool already!!
🔸 Wet Glue Suncatcher
Supplies needed :
🌈School glue.
🌈Food colors.
🌈Toothpick.
🌈Any size plastic lid.
Squirt out some glue into the plastic lid. Then add some drops of food color into it. Using toothpick let them mix the colors. Then it’s time for the lids to go to rest for 3-4 days. Yeah you heard it right but it has to be dried thoroughly. They might even forget about it before seeing the end result 🤔Once dried off carefully scoop it out of the lid and punch a hole to put a string through.
🔸 Bottle cap painting
This is such a simple art using bottle tops. We learned some color mixing too by making purple from red and blue. I showed them how to print the dots and they took off from there. I should admit they make the perfect round prints. So next time if you need round stamps for any art consider the bottle tops. Recycling for the win!!
I drew the grape outline along with a stem and let them stamp inside. It was hard to make M to stamp inside the lines. Always have a spare sheet for young toddlers to stamp around or paint freely so that they can create something of their own too.
🔸 Letter Tracing mat
We are still going strong with these tracing mats from Lavinia pop’s inmyworld. Her love for dry erase markers make this happen so far.
Sensory Bin
🔸 Flower Garden
Sensory fillers in this bin are black sand from dollar store and green aquarium gravel along with some stones. For ‘planting’ I used the pots and flowers( from dollar store again).
She loved pouring the sand and rocks to the pots for quite a while. Then shockingly she banged two pots together and it broke. They had tiny sharp pieces so I switched to some green plastic containers. A word of caution there to try some plastic pots for these bins.
Playdough Invitation
🔸 Explore Green
A simple Playdough invitation to explore various green materials. It helps to emphasize the color green as well as spark imagination. Here’s what’s in the tray:
- Spikey balls
- Color dowels
- Craft sticks
- Green jewels
The Wall of Fame
