Learning the letter a fun activities

Today we did activities all about the letter a.  It was great fun even though Little Boo said that it was not her favourite letter apparently her favourite is the letter w.  I have no idea why as it is not in her name I think it is because it is like a zigzag. Anyway back to the letter a.  We made up our initial sounds tub again which currently consists of an apple, aubergine. arrow and aeroplane.  We are going to add more as we find items.

Little Boo was having a bit of a book day where all she wanted to do was pretend to read to me.  Due to this we then went on to read a few of our books about animals that began with the letter a and alphabet books.  We have this fantastic book from the library where the animal images are life size

We have also had this alphabet train full of books since Little Boo was a baby they are a great set and what is even better is that she can trace the letter a with her finger on the back of the book. 

We are also very lucky as a very nice friend kindly donated the whole set of these Jane Belk Moncure books so we looked at the letter a book.  These books are really nice as the little letter a person goes along putting all the things beginning with letter a into a box.  These are really good books to go with the sensory tubs as it is the same concept.

We also had a game of popping the letter a thank you to the activity mom  for this fab idea we just changed it slightly and used lower case letters.  When we popped them we said the letter sound. 

 I quickly made this very easy jigsaw.  All I did was print out two letter a's backed one onto card and cut it out.  The other one is used  to help place it together.

Our letter a sheet today we used acetate that is smooth and fabric which was furry. Little Boo again picked what images that she wanted. 

This was the most fun though! fine motor alphabet fishing with the big tweezers.  

 Little Boo picked the letter

 Then matched it

She soon got bored of the tweezers though and wanted to get her hands in.  Who can blame her?

This is another little gem that I want to share with you the new Twinkl app for learning the letter sounds.  This app has been created by Twinkl and is amazing! It has been made with parents in mind.  I brought the full package at £4.99 as it covers all the phonics phases.  It is also great for me as it has helped me to learn the letter sounds properly.  

Included in the app is writing the letters when we do this we use the stylus that I brought for a few pounds on ebay.  This is great for learning how to write as the stylus has to be held like a pencil. 

 This is one of the games on there where you have to match the sounds.  This worked well as Little Boo would repeat the letter sound.

I hope that you like all the ideas do not forget to leave some comments if you like them would be great to see what people think. 

s is for...

I have decided to start creating initial sounds tubs for Little Boo.  The idea is that each tub contains items that begin with the initial sound.  We will be sharing these tubs with you every week and our progress on learning the alphabet.  I really want learning the alphabet to be a fun and interesting activity for Little Boo so I think that this will really help.

I am hoping that this can be a joint venture as creating the tubs will hopefully be really interesting as well. Today we are starting with the letter s for seaside.  I also wanted to start learning the alphabet firstly covering all the letters in Little Boos name.  Even though I am not a preschool teacher I use a lot of sensory activities at work to teach the alphabet as I find that this is very effective when working with adults with severe learning difficulties.  The ability to be able to feel and handle a 3D letter is more engaging.  Being dyslexic myself I also think of ways that I would of liked to have been taught the alphabet basically we need to have fun!

We first of all decided to make pretty the letter s that I made ages ago.  I have been waiting to decorate this the idea is at the end we will have a full set of our own alphabet.  I realise that I have not detailed very well how I made these so will revisit this post and take more pictures. I made my own purely for the fact that I wanted lower case letters and wanted them in a suitable typeface.

The letter s had loads of stars stuck to it and it looked very sparkly by the time it was finished!

Then just a few simple games to reuse those cd cases! I made these up in a few minutes and they were a hit! I was unsure about the finding the letter s one but Little Boo did really well. I am going to get a box set up of these all ready to play with.

I managed to pick up these lovely pebbles from a local shop to be honest we love the noise they make but they were also great for placing on the letter s.  We later placed glow in the dark stars in the shape of the letter s and looked at this in our den, great fun.

We have made a start on our letters book.  For this I have used a sandpaper and bubble wrap letter s in the centre. The idea with this is that Little Boo can feel the letters with her hands and feet.

There was a selection of images that Little Boo could choose from which all begin with s.

Very keen to feel the letters 

After all of this we then had fun choosing what to put in the initial sounds tub

A while ago I posed about sparkly letters this activity could also be done to help write the letters.

When it came to bed time I asked Little Boo to spot the s in the book she did really well.

Whilst doing the crafts today we listened to music and it really helped Little Boos concentration. Why have I not thought of this sooner?

We have also now done letter a activities as well  hope that you enjoy this as well.  The letters are now a Weekly feature so be sure to check back whilst we share a letter a week.