Letters- Tot School

**John is 22 months**
I keep thinking to myself that I am slowly but surely getting back into gear with planning and DOING activities with John. However, I must be in denial because I am still not quite back into the swing of things with John. I have been doing random activities with John as time allows, but nothing just super fun or what I REALLY want to do. But we have been making it out of the house several days a week, hitting up the park a lot now that we won't melt when we step outside, and I even made John a new toy tonight! (I will post about it once I take pictures of it!) Baby steps!

SOOOO...John has really gotten the hang of shapes, colors, and of course numbers. (He is ALWAYS counting! So cute!) So I decided to start focusing more on letters with him. We have been doing an activity here and there for the past two weeks and will continue to work on letters. I thought I would do all the activities within one week but each day time just flies by!! So, here are some activities we have been doing to help John learn those letters!

Dot Stickers
Playing with dot stickers is one of John's favorite things to do! I wrote out the word 'monkey' and drew in little circles. The idea was for John to put a sticker in each dot on the letter. If I pointed out a circle and specifically asked him to put a sticker there, he would do it. Otherwise he kind of just put stickers wherever he wanted. He actually grouped the colors together more than anything. But when I was sitting with him one night he just started calling out the letters without me asking him! He got all of them correct except for the E. I was so impressed.





Another version was just part of the alphabet listed out for him to use the stickers. He again wanted to put stickers wherever. However, since they are such big sheets of paper, they are easy to save and pull out when we need something to do and let him play with it several times before throwing it away.



Today I needed a quick activity to entertain John for about 15 minutes so I wrote a couple letters on a sheet of paper and would say 'put a sticker on the letter ___'. He liked this activity but didn't always put the sticker on the correct letter! So then I wrote letters on a second sheet of paper AND wrote the letters on the stickers. I tried to have him match the sticker with the letter on the paper. This didn't go much better but mainly because I think he was tired of that activity by then.


(not sure why this picture is sideways! sorry!)




Magnetic Letters
I found some magnetic letters at the dollar store and let John just play with them either on the fridge or using a baking pan in the living room. Sometimes I sat with him at the fridge and after we put a couple on the fridge, I asked him to pick out certain letters and most of the time he is pretty good at picking them out. Asking him to tell me which letter I am pointing to is another story! :) One day he took the bag of letters outside and when I looked up, he had put them on our metal table. So, I showed him that we could hang the letters from the edge, which he seemed to enjoy...before he knocked them all down!



A is for Apple
We did apple prints with green and red paint. A little helpful tip is to stab a fork into the apple so your child has something easy to hold onto. It was hard for me to dip the apple into paint without the fork so I couldn't imagine John being able to do it either. Unfortunately we didn't use the right type of paint. It was a gel like paint so it didn't stick to the apple very well so it just kind of made smudgy circles all over the paper. But John really enjoyed it so that is all that is important!




Other Activities...sorry no pics!
**We have a foam letter mat so we have used that often as a big puzzle. Once we put the letters in their place John would stand on a letter and I would call out a letter for him to hop to. He loved it! I tried to have him trace the letters with his cars but he just drove his cars all over the mat instead. He loved played with the foam letters and I was glad he was being exposed to the different letters even if we weren't specifically learning each letter.

**I cut out letters from an old magazine and John glued them down on a sheet of paper to make a collage. We talked about what each letter was and sometimes sorted the letters as we glued them down. I have it hanging on the fridge so he can see it and just tonight I saw him looking at it and reading off some of the letters!

**We have a set of cubes with different letters and numbers on them. So we sorted them into two piles: letters and numbers. Then John had fun stacking the cubes and knocking them down. I tried to spell out a word with the blocks and have him find the matching letters but he wasn't interested.

**Read Chicka Chicka Boom Boom about a thousand times!!!

Things I still want to do...
1. Play with letter flash cards and match them up with objects around the house.
2. Play with magnetic letters more- similar to Brown Bear, Brown Bear but make it Letter A, Letter A...
3. Draw letters on driveway with sidewalk chalk and trace them with cars or walk over them.

So, that is what we have been up to the last two weeks or so. I am so hoping to get my act together one of these days!! Be sure to check back soon for the SUPER EASY toy I made John John tonight!

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