Don't forget to enter our Montessori Toddler Language Cards giveaway this week!
These letter Q trays were a little hard to pull together, to be honest. Its hard to explain words like quite, quiet, quickly, quiz and other common q words to a 2-year-old. Even common preschool words like quilt were kind of tough, Henry just wanted to call it a blanket.
But, before this week, Henry was able to identify the capital Q and the lowercase q and say the letter, so I'm happy. We will continue letter Q for one more week, but here are our letter q tot school trays.
On the first tray was a "quilt" pattern that I created. I just drew a little pattern freehand, then laminated the sheet. Then I cut a bunch of fabric scraps to match the patterns in the quilt. The idea was for Henry to roughly match up the shapes to sheet to make a quilt.
In theory, Henry liked this tray and he kept coming back to it. But, then he would start, do a couple pieces and walk away. That was probably my fault and I should have made the pattern less complex -- I think I got a little carried away.
The second tray was a letter q hunt! I used a mixture of quinoa, rice, and barely in a large bin. Then, I hid different colored capital and lowercase letter Q's. Then, the tray included a matching sheet where Henry could match the Q's that he found to the correct color. This was the first time that I included different shades of color on the sheet, to make it a little tougher. This was also the first time that Henry, has kept almost all of the sensory material in the bin, instead of dumping it out!
This was a huge favorite this week. The first day it was out, Henry spent more than an hour just doing this tray, over and over again. He loves to find his favorite color -- yellow. He was also surprisingly good about acknowledging the difference between the light and dark shades.
The final tray was a queen's crown sheet I made with a small cup of glass beads. The goal was for Henry to place each of the beads, or jewels, onto the queen's crown. It was an easy fine motor activity that sort of had something to do with Q.
Henry also enjoyed this activity, but not in the way it was intended. Instead, he really liked to just walk carefully around the room with the glass cup filled with the beads. It turned out to be great practice for not spilling his cup, which we have been working on now that we have moved away from sippys.
So far, letter Q tot school has been really fun, hopefully it continues that way this week, I'll share all the other activities we've been up to in Letter Q Tot School Week 2!
