Category Archives: Letters and Phonics

Alphabet Soup

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We have some lovely letters for letter and word exploration. As the girls were playing in their kitchen a while ago, I gathered them up. I also had a big black pot, perfect for soup.

Daisy began to put the letters into the pot. The magnetic teaching tiles stuck to the inside and outside of the enamel pot. Daisy immediately began making words. I supported her word making when asked.

She added her wooden letters and letters stones, enjoying the ‘plonk’ and ‘thud’ they made in the pot.

Next, it was off on an ingredient hunt… no she did not add ice-cream. She did add carrots and cucumber however!

Finally, to mix it all up, Daisy borrowed a big wooden spoon.

Yes, you can see some odd Halloween decorations in the background. We did this a while ago and I forgot to post it. A witches hat was handy and the alphabet soup was suddenly a potion which needed chanting and singing to accompany it. The only thing that came to my mind was Shakespeare; “Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and caldron bubble.” Daisy came up with alternatives which included a mishmash of what she was hearing from books at home and daycare.

Alphabet soup served up for Rose, Daisy and I. Yum!

And Miss Mischief enjoyed helping with the cooking.

Playing with word families

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Daisy has been telling me how she can spell ‘bat’ and ‘cat’ for a few weeks now so I thought it was time for some focused word family play. We started with Hands on Learning Word Family Mats and I limited the exploration to two word families ‘at’ and ‘in’. I also limited the number of initial letters to give her success in word building

‘Cat’ was the first word and was proudly written down.

The word ‘sat’ proved more difficult. As I explained in light table colour bags a few weeks ago, Daisy was inverting her ‘s’s. She is more aware and thinks before writing an ‘s’ now but was still struggling so I quickly drew a big reminder for her finger to run along. I believe it is important to correct her kin-aesthetic memory now, rather than bad habits becoming embedded. The big ‘s’ helped and eased her frustration.

After writing ‘sat’ Daisy remembered ‘Bat’ and wrote it eagerly. It gave me the opportunity to talk about the two finger space needed between words.

She made a few more words and started to lose interest… time to get active!

These write-on wipe-off dice have been in the back of my mind for a while. I occasionally look at them and think….. what a great idea but would they work?

I labelled the red dice with ‘at’ and ‘in’ and labelled the blue dice with the letters t, p, s and b so the initial letters would work with either word family (at or in).

Underlining the letters made it easier to read and orientate. As you can see the ‘at’ in the picture rubbed off slightly. This is because at this point we were throwing with some force on the carpets and hitting obstacles. I explained to Daisy the need for holding only the coloured edges and this system worked well. Using a box or a three sided box, would work well in the classroom to keep the die contained.

Throwing the dice made word making instantly fun again. I love the dice!

We took turns throwing and then reading the words we made.

To add interest Daisy suggested we aim between legs. The great idea had us jumping to block the dice. Fine motor, gross motor and word building all combined to make an activity that did not seem to get tiring for a 4 year old!

The Sound ‘I’ (short i)

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It seems like forever since we did a sound/letter post. We have been doing lots of word and letter work I have just been keeping it to myself! So here I am sharing our work the sound ‘i’ (short i) makes.

For the sound ‘i’ our activities included:

  • Playing pairs with the first 6 letters. These cards are photocopied from JP Handbook

  • Making cvc words with ‘i’ as the vowel.

  • We made an igloo using a Styrofoam half sphere and cotton balls.

  • Another igloo from sugar cubes. There were more but my husband used them in his coffee!

  • An ‘i’ word search from DLTK. Just be aware that the long and short ‘i’ sounds are used in this word search. As Daisy was finding words we discussed the sound the initial letter was making. This activity was done together as the words are beyond Daisy and the concept of word searching was new.

  • ‘i’ movements- as you can see the movements are ice skating, child’s pose for insect and sliding along like an inch worm. Movement Activities A To Z is a great book I have just discovered and I will be telling you you more about it in the future.
  • Yoga was limited for this sound although we did work on breathing, emphasizing the inhale and exhale.
  • Looking at various representations of Ii on Pinterest