The 'A-B-Cindys'

The literacy project is coming along. We took a break for the month of December. We had started the letter 'F' when my in-laws came to visit, but then we got busy doing fun things with them, so I put 'F' on the shelf for a while. I decided to wait until the holidays were over to re-do 'F'. I probably could have moved on if it was another letter, but Doug was still confusing it with 'E'.  Doug is doing pretty well with the alphabet song too. He now only occasionally sings "A-B-Cin-Dee".  My God-Mother's name is Cindy, and Doug adores her. If you sing "A-B-C-D-E" it does sort of sound like you're singing "Cindy", so I can't blame him there. I once heard a small child sing the middle of the alphabet "EL UH MENTO PEE!". Doug does fairly well with that part too now.


Here's our new and improved surprise box:

Doug gets excited on Mondays when he sees it. I have a large foam letter 'F' from our alphabet mat in there as well as a picture to color with the letter and a fire truck. I also include about 5 things that start with the letter of the week. On the second day of the week, we watch a Sesame Street video on the computer about the letter. I also give him a laminated letter that looks like a  Highway that he can drive his cars on. Usually on Wednesday I give Doug an envelope with 'Letter' mail. It has a felt letter and objects that begin with the week's letter either made out of felt or laminated with a Velcro back. I usually do a worksheet on Wednesday too. I make them myself. I put about 12 letters, all capital letters, on a sheet and he has to circle the ones that are the letter of the week. On Fridays, I cut about 12 letters out, all the same, and stick them to the walls with tape and Doug has to hunt for them. When he's gotten them all, he has to feed them to 'Alpha Bet', the puppet I made. Alpha Bet needs Doug to tell him the name of the letter Doug's feeding him, because Alpha Bet is a picky eater. We also do a foam letter project, in which we create something that starts with the letter of the week using that letter:

I usually try to do one special activity a week with the letter. For the letter 'B' I blew up a bunch of balloons and wrote a large 'B' on them. For 'C' week we made cookies shaped like the letter 'C':

 I think Cookie Monster would approve!

 This was our special activity the first time we did the letter 'F':

I found some clip art of fish and then I enlarged the fish and put a large capital letter 'F' on each one. I then printed them out and laminated them. After that, I took some sticky back magnetic strips and put them on the backs. To make the fishing 'hook', I took a binder clip and put some very small, crazy strong magnets in them so they'd be able to pull up the fish. Because of the very small magnets, we never let Doug play with this unsupervised. Doug absolutely loved this activity! I think I'm going to try to come up with a new activity this time we do 'F'.

We've also started working with numbers. I have a different box that I bring out in the middle of the week to talk about numbers. It has a coloring page with the number on it and a corresponding number of things on the page. It also has a large foam number in the box as well as the amount of corresponding legos. I also give him a number worksheet that I make. It has the number printed at the top and three columns below it. Doug has to pick the column that has the number of objects in it that match the number of the week. I'm thinking of also integrating a video from Sesame Street into this activity too.

Just looking at all the various activities we do is exhausting. No wonder we took a break!