Teacher role play- learning in a fun way.

Sorry I have been gone for a while I have been so busy finishing my PGCE I am pleased to say it is now completed!!!

It seems very appropriate that today's blog post is all about Boo playing teachers.   Ever since she started back at nursery this term she loves playing teachers.  I have lost count how many times I have ended up on the time out spot!! I decided to assist with this new found interest by providing a few resources that she could use to make it more interesting.

The great thing is that Boo is learning at the same time without realising it.  She spends her time teaching me my numbers and letter sounds on occasions I pretend to get it wrong so that gives her the opportunity to correct me. This proves to me that she understands.

Inside the teachers box is

• Resources from Twinkl  teacher role play pack letter formation worksheets
• RML Phonics cards- my Dad got these from the charity shop at a great price bless him! 
• Buttons to count 
• White board markers as all the sheets are laminated and can be reused 
• Pen 
• An old filo fax I do not use this now and Boo loves writing in it 
• Post it notes 
• Medal- for the student who is best behaved 

I am sure that Boo will add more items to this as we use it.

Using play-dough to learn to spell names

I wanted to share this with you today as it combines all the things that Little Boo likes at the moment: play dough, stamps and her name.  We have used stamps (Melissa and Doug Alphabet stamps) to make an impression of the letters for her name. Then we used the play dough to make the letters out of the spaghetti that Little Boo made using one of her play dough toys.

 Another way to learn the letters is to write into the play dough with a pen something that Little Boo did yesterday with the microwave salt dough.

Numbers and Letters Box

A few months ago we sorted out all Little Boos toys and placed them into categories. Sad, I know but this has really helped me with our day to day activities. I know if she wants to play at fancy dress that the box is ready and waiting we also have ones for sticker/colouring books, play food and dolly things .  I just wish that all my stuff was this organised! Anyway, I wanted to share with you what we have in the Numbers and Letters box.  This is used to inspire Little Boo with numbers, letters and colours.

In the box we have things that we have collected over time such as free toys from magazines.  These we use as a matching activity or to count.

Buttons can be used for a multitude of things counting, sorting the biggest from the smallest, sorting into colours, making patterns or counting out a set amount. More ideas are on The Activity Mom .

Pebbles these we have used to count and to place around letters. I am also going to paint/collage a few with Little Boo and place letters on them so she can spell out her name.

We have a leap frog fridge magnet alphabet set . Little Boo has had this since she was really Little in the old house we had it on our fridge and she used to play with it loads and often dance to the tune.  Unfortunately this seems out of stock at the moment but leap frog also do a Letter Factory which looks really good and the same sort of concept.

There is a large tub of colour animal counters which I got from the education show last year at a very good price.  These have been great to sort into colours and group or count them.  There is also a tub of play animals that Little Boo likes to match up and place in groups then count them.

There are some animal dominoes in the box which Little Boo is getting really good at playing. This is great to learn matching and also learning to take turns whilst playing games. The musical instruments are included as very often we play a beat then Little Boo tries to copy what I have just done.

The wooden fruits are a fantastic threading set that I brought from the education show a few years ago (again at a much cheaper price) when Little Boo was just learning to thread.  They are lovely to use and are made for younger children to practice threading we also use them to make patterns with now.

The bus is a laminated sheet from twinkle where we count the people onto the bus. I have printed some flash cards with different amounts of pennies on them as well from Twinkle.

The most important thing is to make it all FUN! and keep adding things to it as your child progresses. 

Find your name in the bath

Little Boo has shown interest in learning how to spell her own name.  I have seen letters and numbers that you can take into the bath.  However, rather than spend a fortune buying these I decided to make some letters out of fun foam so we could play at catching the letters in the bath.  Once Little Boo had caught them I helped her to put then in the correct place to spell her name as the fun foam sticks to the wall once it is wet. She really enjoyed this activity and it was great fun to catch the letters.

Busy bags 4

Little Boo loves Charlie and Lola so I was really pleased when I found this dress up game on Cbeebies website. I coloured In the images but older children would probably enjoy doing this themselves. I then laminated it ready for use. This game was never intended for use as a travel game but rethinking the idea and having used it (in the car) I think I needed to add some magnets onto the pieces if we intend to use it as a travel game again. It was good fun but the pieces were slipping everywhere in the car which got frustrating.

There are some other busy bag items which I brought all rather cheap. The first a small magnetic sketch board. A Mr potato head where you attach his facial features. This was a good game to learn where parts of the face go using a lot of position words to explain as Little Boo was playing. The last brought item is shoe lacing.

As mentioned earlier on the blog I wanted to make Little Boo some more threading cards with all the letters of her name. I have done this as a busy bag idea and it has worked well. I am hoping this will help with learning the letters of her name.      

                                                                         

learning the letter b

Today we have been learning the letter b in a very messy and fun way! I hope that you like some of the ideas.

We have been trying out masking tape resist painting.  This is basically where you place masking tape in an area where you do not want there to be paint. It works wonderfully as Little Boo could just go crazy with the paints and then like magic when the paint was dry a letter b appears when the tape is peeled off.

The letter b completed 

I also made a letter b template this was to draw around but Little Boo had other ideas and we used it as a stencil instead.

Recently we made salt dough letters using the play dough cutters so have painted some of these to place in the initial sounds tub.

Little Boo loves anything to do with threading so I quickly made this threading letter b. I was really pleased that she enjoyed it so much.  It was really simple to make I just used mount card and my crop-a-dile to make the holes. Little Boo is using some shoe laces for threading which Nanny picked up from the £1 shop. This could be a brilliant busy bag idea I think.

Little Boo did a great job after showing off her handy work to Daddy she had to show him how she did it. 

I found loads of inspiration through Pinterest (which I am addicted to).  Firstly thank you to Hands on as we grow for this wonderful alphabet maze idea .  We just tweaked the idea slightly as Little Boo has not yet learnt all the alphabet.  We used the idea but used only the letters we have covered (those in her name) and set it up like a bus stop idea where the bus had to "go to letter a" then it had to go to letter s etc. It worked more as a letter recognition game this way.  My worry dolls also made great passengers that were counted on the bus.

From Pinterest I found  DIY letter blocks idea from Simply Real Moms  this shows the uppercase  letter building but after a bit of searching I found the lowercase letter templates on Tired, need sleep thank you so much for this great template as it saved me so much time!  These templates took minutes to print and cut out.  I decided to cut them out of fun foam as they can then be used in the bath or on windows around the house.

Thought I may mention again the alphabet game which was on our No more odd socks post.  This is a game whereby the child throws a ball or in our case the odd sock balls we had made at the letter that is shouted out.

Learning letters the letters are written in chalk on the slabs. 

Not forgetting our initial sound tub which this week consists of a bobble, the letter b (salt dough), a toy bear, toy bus, toy banana, small ball and a massive button donated from my Mom.

I have set up a Pinterest board all about learning letters please feel free to follow.  Hope that you all have a great weekend.

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.