Henry is 22 months old.
As I said last week, we moved on to letters in tot school. I'm excited because there are so many great toddler activities for letters. Naturally, we started with the letter A. Henry really seemed to enjoy the new focus at tot school. For now, the book bin and activity wall are on hold. I'm not quite sure of the direction I want to take them, but they should be back soon enough.
This week Henry started out being able to identify and say the letter A. He had a much harder time identifying a lower case A but had no trouble with the capital.
The first tray this week were a capital and lower case A with circles. The tray then included enough pom-poms to fill each circle. This tray not only gave Henry some exposure to both capital and lower case A, it was good fine motor work for him. Henry had a great time dumping the bowl of pom-poms and picking them up again, but wasn't super interested in actually placing the letters in the spaces.
The second tray was a group of 3-part cards that I made. All of the cards had "A-words" on them. However, instead of cutting all of the cards out I left one set together, so it was more like a puzzle. I think Henry still gets a little too distracted and has difficulty matching if they are all cut. This was the first time I included the word cards too. Henry did really well matching the pictures, but had a hard time with the words. If I told him what the word said, he did match it to the correct picture.
The final tray was a little weak, but ended up being Henry's favorite. It was a letter A sensory bin with various letter A objects including an angel, a few airplanes, a few apples, large foam A, cut up straws to make the letter A, and a few other things. Henry loved to play with all these objects particularly the large foam A. Henry didn't quite understand how to make an A with the straws but unexpectedly used the straws to trace letter A's that he saw around the room -- which I was really pleased with.
As we move forward with letters, I plan on doing more printables and worksheets than we have done in the past. Extras we did this week included:
Dot painted an A: Henry really enjoyed this. It was the first time he had to use dot paints for something structured. He listened and tried so hard.
Dry-Erase A line tracing: Henry cannot do this activity on his own. He loves to color with these types of markers, but even with help struggles to trace the line.
A matching: I printed out a variety of A's in different fonts in two colors. The goal was to match the black and green A's in the same font. Henry really found this challenging and gave up pretty quickly. He did have fun putting lower case A's into an apple ice cube tray.
Food Fun: I made an A in Hen's breakfast one morning, he pretty much lost it he was so happy.
Snow Sensory Bin: I made some red and green apple ice cubes (found at Target's dollar spot), and placed them into a bin of fresh snow. In the snow I wrote a capital and lower case A with food coloring. Hen played for an hour in this bucket, and could have sat and played all day if it hadn't melted! Tip, if you want to do this, skip the food coloring. It turned out to be a huge mess and totally not worth the 2.5 seconds that the As were there.
Do you have any favorite letter A activities?
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