Halloween Themed Monster Letter and Number Cards

Happy first day of October!!! I can already smell Halloween in the air! The boys got their costumes yesterday and are so excited for Halloween! Speaking of which, I'm pleased to introduce our Monster Lab Letter and Number Cards. These will be perfect for your Halloween-themed activities for October. 

FREE Beginning Letter Sound Posters and Cards (SAMPLER)

We are starting a new approach to our literacy activities.  To have some variety in our literacy activities I decided to pause our usual pink series (Beginning Letter Sound Activity Sheets) and move to Jolly Phonics.  Jolly Phonics is a curriculum used here in Ireland (and UK).  My eldest loved it, especially the action sounds that went along with the letters.

Preschool Learning Letter L Activities

Presenting our letter “l” activities!  We’ve started “letter of the week” kind of activities since September because of Vito’s interest in letter sounds and reading.  We’ve been reading FIAR books over the summer and this led him to further explore words and language activities.  

FREE Letter L Dot and Tracing Activity Sheets

The leaves are beginning to fall! We’re seeing a lot in our area so yesterday, we collected a few and brought it home. Vito immediately took our letter L dot sheets to go along with his new discoveries: fallen leaves!

Preschool Learning Letter A Activities

We’ve started letter activities again because of the renewed interest of Vito with our language materials.  Let me just share with you some of these activities in case you needed ideas on how to start a letter of unit activity with your kids.

FREE Letter A Dot and Tracing Activity Sheets

Last spring Vito and I started to work on letters and letter sounds again (Beginning Letter Phonics Cards and Beginning Reading: Language Objects and Activities).  Because he enjoyed working on these Letter B activity sheets, he always asked for “more” sheets to work on and always repeating “buh for bird” and other b objects.  This led me to create more sheets! And because it’s apple season, I gave him “Aa” and it was perfect!  He worked on all three sheets!  More of this letter A activities but for now, I’m sharing our FREE letter A sheets.

FREE Letter B for Bear Mazes

Vito is currently in a sensitive period with mazes.  The first time I noticed this was when we were eating in a restaurant and he was all of a sudden glued on the kids’ activity page given to him which contains lots of mazes.  And much to my surprise, he successfully solved most of it!  This went for weeks, whenever we are in restaurants.  So what to do when your child acts like this?  Of course, print lots and lots of mazes at home, give them pens and markers, and have them work the mazes out!  You can see a series of this post in my Instagram, accounting his fascination with mazes.  (Vito likes mazes while Mavi is into crossword puzzles LOL)

FREE Letter B Dot and Tracing Activity Sheets

I’m so happy of how my dot activity sheets for Vito turned out!  I prepared this for our Bird Unit (for the letter b sound) and has been a morning ritual for Vito to complete covering the dots with our glass nuggets.

Early Literacy with Beginning Letter Sound BINGO Game

Vito is 36 months old.

Hello everyone! It’s been awhile!  We’re having minor fixes at home thus, the lack of updates and posts.  But I am so happy to say, that Vito is FINALLY interested with letters! He’s currently showing eagerness in learning how to write and read letters.  You can check our updates and photos in my Instagram account.  So expect A LOT of letter/phonics/reading activities in the coming days… and months from us!

To start with, we played a BINGO game early this week and I was so happy that Vito loved and enjoyed it!

Preschool Letter B

A long overdue post of our letter B activities.  Vito is currently sick so I barely have  time to post.  We are not doing any “homeschool” activities except for reading books and play with his farm set.  Below are some ideas for learning letter B sound and prewriting activities. 

FREE Alphabet Cards

I’ve been searching high and low for alphabet cards doesn’t have cliparts or pictures in them but I can’t find one.  So I made one for Vito as he usually gets distracted with images.  The sole purpose of these cards is for him to familiarize with LOWERCASE letters. He knows their sounds, all of the 26 letters but can’t recognize some of the lowercase, thus these cards are born!

Tot School: Letter ‘Rr’

Vito is 28 months old.

Vito is currently in his sensitive years and I am taking advantage of this period as he’s really into ALL our activities, positioning himself in his table asking for something to “play”.  So this week, we started with letter R. Why letter R and not A? Well, I decided to follow the RAMFBITG method of introducing letter sounds to Vito. To know why, read about it here.

Learning Activities for 28 Months Toddler

These are the activities designed for Vito for this month as we are celebrating springtime integrating St. Patrick’s Day and Easter.  Materials used are provided below for your reference.

Tot School Snippets Week 1: Ice

I was reading my old blog the other day (private) and I am amazed on how I recorded Mavi’s learning curve week by week. Mavi enjoys reading that blog now! I just have to say that it is quite different when you have one child, you have focus, you have MORE time  and well,  I was organized.  Now, I’m managing and engineering a bigger household, with a school boy and a hyperactive toddler, I barely have time to blog. 

So  now, I will start writing about Vito’s activities in a week. I have to put a little effort on this, for keeping memories and for Vito to read someday.  Currently, we’re not following schedule of doing totschool weekly.  There are days when we do a lot of activities, and there are times when I just whip anything that goes into  my mind. 

Vito is 26 months old.

Letter ‘t’ Sound Activities for Toddlers

 

Vito’s activities last week revolves around the letter ‘t’.  As you all know, we’re working with letter sounds for a while and funny how he’s able to name alphabets using their sounds these days instead of their names LOL.    The unit is not just actually a week’s work, but it took us 2 weeks TO get over with the materials and activities, because Vito kept using them! Let me share with you activities we did to explore and learn objects with the letter ‘t’ sound.

Lettet T Object Basket.  Let’s start with our object basket.  I filled it with 3-4 objects starting with letter t that Vito uses a  lot at home like torch, telescope/binoculars, teeth and Titanic LEGO made by Mavi.  Then added a few letters like this foam letter from Munchkins (Vito used to bite these!) and the all time favourite letters from Hape.

Train Shape Cards.  I made these! I’m so happy on how it turned out.  The train plus the DIY air dry clay shapes are currently Vito’s favourite activity. He loves matching the shapes to that in the train! 

That’s his brother’s sleep mask (from Emirates), which is his favorite accessory as of the moment.

Color Sorting using Transport Counters.  The counters are from Learning Resources and this is one of our favourites!  The train cards are DIY: using a train coloring image, I printed it in different colors of cardstock and laminated it. 

He worked on them but doesn’t stay long. As I previously said, color sorting is NOT his favourite thing as of the moment.  But even so, I still would introduce different kinds of color activities just in case he might find his interest.

Counting.  Vito loves to count, it’s like effortless in my part to make him count and identify numbers.  He counts on his own and is always giddy whenever he sees numbers.  So this turtle activity is his favourite.  We just don’t have enough turtle figures to count up to 10 LOL.  The turtle counters are from Safari Toob.  We previously worked on trees as well for our letter t unit. Check it out here

Brushing of Teeth Teeth.  Our model of mouth/teeth is just so awesome! Vito is fascinated with this and loves brushing it with his toothbrush LOL.  This is a wonderful practical life activity, especially to those little ones who are hesitant to brush their teeth   Know where you can get these teeth model here.

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Letter N: Going Nuts!

I love nuts! We’ve got plenty around the house, thus I decided to come up with activities for Vito since he’s been seeing them around the house and loves to play with my walnuts.

Letter N Object Basket.  Reinforce literacy, letter ‘n’ symbol and phonics,  vocabulary, and verbal skills.  In the basket we have: nine, upper and lowercase N/n, necktie, DIY sandpaper ‘n’, nuts.

Hammering Peanuts.  This is a practical life activity that develops hand and eye coordination, and develop those hand and arm muscles.  I first set it up in a tray, but the peanuts were slipping so I had to put cling film to hold them. Vito loves physical activities so he enjoyed this. The only drawback is that the hammer that we used were so tiny  

Letter N Craft.  I always make sure to include crafts in our weekly activities.  My main goal here is for Vito to practice his manual dexterity like squeezing the glue, picking up small objects or pencils.  Now that he’s familiar with glue, I gave him a glue with small opening for him to squeeze it. 

Here he is applying peanut shells on the letter N. Improves pincer grasp through picking up small objects.  Note to parents: always supervise your children when dealing with small objects. 

Color Green. I’m introducing letter green this week.  I gathered a few objects from his toys and place them all in a basket. 

And we painted green in an A3 paper.  Working with one color a week works for him.

When they dried up, we place them on the wall for everyday viewing.

Nut Matching. For visual discrimination (difference in objects), widen vocabulary and concentration.

Counting Walnuts.  Builds early number and counting skills.

Forming Shapes using Nuts.  Teaches shapes, fine motor skills and hand/eye coordination. This is Vito’s idea!  I made a circle using the walnuts then he took the circle puzzle and place it in the middle, matching them together. Brilliant!  We practice some more by drawing shapes on a piece of paper and he would trace the line using the peanut shells to form the shape. He enjoyed it!

And that’s about it! And what I happened to the nuts? I’m still consuming them LOL. 

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Letter L: Leaf Activities in Autumn

We are joining the bandwagon of autumn-themed activities and for Vito, we’re having leaf activities!

Leaf Color Matching

Got these beautiful craft leaves from a local store and used them for sorting colors.  I just dumped them in a container and would take one leaf at a time. I then mention the color and placed it to where it belongs.  Vito loves calling out their names!  I am not sure if he could recognize colors yet, it’s a hit or miss for him.  It’s a challenge to put up a color sorting activity for him so I put an extra effort on making it fun like making noises or funny sounds as I drop the leaf to the sorted group.

Letter Z: Zoo Animal Activities

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Vito is 22 months old.

Vito is currently obsessing over his Schleich zoo animals.  I just started collecting these animal figures early this year as I can see that both of my boys can benefit from it.  I decided to put together zoo-themed activities for the little Vito, an opportunity to learn and explore the letter ‘z’.

Dear Zoo Story Basket

Vito loves this Dear Zoo book!  We read it over and over again each day, and he specifically loves opening and closing the flaps to discover the animal hidden in it.

Zoo Animal Tracks

My boys can’t get enough of playdough, and we used our Schleich animals to create beautiful tracks!  It was a total hit!

Animal Skin Covers

And who wouldn’t love skin patterns! It amazes me how Vito can match the animals with its cover!  I only prepared 6 of his favourite animals and he is working on them everyday.  As we progress, I’ll add up some more to make it challenging for him.

Letter Z Craft

Our letter of the week (craft) is usually hanged in the wall for a week’s view (for recognition) LOL.

Animals Clean Up

Original plan was to wash and brush these animals.  But it was cold and we couldn’t do it indoors so I ended up giving him the wipes instead.  He enjoyed this!

Zoo Animals Matching Cards

Something that he do everyday as well, matching the figures with the cards! This activity is for object recognition, discrimination and exactness. You can download your FREE copy from here.

The images in the cards are from Schleich.

Letter Z Object Basket

Our object basket is typically for letter recognition and phonics sounds.

And that’s all about our fun adventure of learning the letter z sound and zoo animals.  Stay tuned for our next letter sound of the week… something to do with autumn!  And yes, please don’t forget to pin this for later!

Other letter sound we’ve done:

Letter a for apple

Letter b for ball

Letter c for car

Letter d for dinosaur

Letter e for egg

Letter s for star

Letter E: Parts of the Body Unit Activities

Last week, I put up a body parts unit study for Vito with emphasis on the letter E.  I’d like to share some of the materials and activities I prepared for him, of which he truly enjoyed.

1.  Recognition of body parts.

Vito knows most of his body parts so I introduced our Body Parts Cards to him for abstract presentation.  The cards were used for identification, but in different ways. 

• I would show the card and ask “what’s this?” Vito would answer and at the same time point to that part of his body.
• I used the doll for identification (3rd person) like “where is the dolly’s hair?”
• I could see him at times looking at the cards and imitate the picture.  So cute!

We are using my The Parts of the Body cards which you can get from here.

2.  Letter E objects

I’ve got three objects for our letter e:  eye, elephant and egg.  I so love this method! To expand the child’s vocabulary, learn phonics and letters all at the same time!

Vito always goes to this tray and would give me the object and say its name.  As for letter e, I love that he can remember the sound of ‘e’ whenever he encounters this in books! How amazing!

3.  Writing using our Egg shaped crayons

We are using Crayola here.

4.  Tracing the body

Oh yes, this was fun! Mavi participated as well!      

                            

5.  Letter E for egg

So he worked on peeling the eggshells…

and devoured the egg!

                        

And we later on used the eggshell in our letter E craft.

 

6.  Making a face

I cut out some different shapes, used a yarn for the hair and paper plate for the head and we have this cute face!  Vito was happy enough to wipe out all the glue as well.

7.  Body Parts Puzzle

Yes, if there’s one time that a little toddler can do with body parts is to start using a simple dress-up bear puzzle, with head, body and legs portion and being emphasized.  He couldn’t fit perfectly the pieces yet but he knows exactly where to  put the head, limb and legs.  We’ll do more of this!

And that’s about our activities for learning the body parts.  Don’t forget to pin this for later!

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