the alphabet

The girls' icky colds continued today. Their noses drip so much that I think we've already gone through two boxes of tissues since Sunday! They are still dragging a bit so we stayed home to try and fully recover.

It's really hard to stay home all day. The three of us are getting bored with our surroundings. The girls a more crabby because they aren't feeling too well so the days are getting long. Cabin fever has definitely set in.

Since we started ECFE a couple of weeks ago, I am trying to focus more on "academics". I'm trying to introduce more "structured" activities to practice following directions, sharing, listening, and creating accomplishments.

The girls are really great with the alphabet. They have been able to recite it for quite some time. Both recognize all of the capital letters. They also know a word that starts with each letter. I know they are just using memorization, but it's a start. (It's fun when we are out and about and I hear "I see M for Mommy!").

They girls have a Disney Princess book that works on matching skills. They must "read" it every day before bed. So, since they love the concept of matching, I thought I would use this idea to work on recognizing lower case letters (something they aren't too good at yet). 

I made two sets of "cards" with capital letters and two sets of "cards" with lowercase letters. Starting with the capital letters, I kept one set to myself and dealt out the other set to the girls. I then drew a card from my pile and asked them to identify. Little Pie usually exclaimed it first in her loudest and most excited voice ever! Then I asked them to look in their piles of letters to see if they had the matching one. Finally, whomever had the matching one placed it on top of mine.

Little Bird caught onto the "game" immediately and followed my directions exactly without deviating. She knew right away that if she didn't have the card, Little Pie did. Little Pie however was more interested in drawing her own cards and announcing the letter. She had a harder time paying attention to me and following the directions. It was hard to keep them both focused for all 26 letters, but I think they did pretty well. 

We didn't get to the lower case letters because I didn't think they had the attention to get through it. I was pleased enough with just teaching them the idea of the game. We'll try lower case soon.

Today we worked on an arts and crafts project with the alphabet. The girls sat on the stools at our island counter and were so pleased with themselves that they were such big girls.

I made a construction paper tree trunk and glued it to another piece of paper. Then I cut out leaves and wrote both uppercase and lowercase letter on them. My idea was to ask them to find the Aa, then Bb, then Cc, etc. and have them glue them on. Again, Little Bird followed my directions exactly, waiting for me to ask her to find a specific letter before picking one up to glue on her tree. Little Pie just picked up whatever letter she wanted, announced what it was and glued it to her tree. 

I only had one glue stick and they did AMAZINGLY well with sharing it. Also, I only showed them once how to use it and glue the letters on the tree. I continued to be amazed that each time they worked with a letter, they correctly put the glue on the blank side. I never had to show them again. 

This turned out to be a great project because it wasn't messy!!! The girls loved the glue stick!

Also, we added a sun (or sunny as the girls say) to each picture. They had some odd placements of where they thought the sun should go!