Letter Ring

My oldest daughter is in Kindergarten.  To help learn her sight words her teacher made up a stack of word cards, punched holes in them, and placed them on a loose leaf book ring.  My son and his friend like to flip through her cards, even though they can't read them.  So I made up a set of letter cards for each of them.  I used card stock, a hole punch, a paper cutter, and a loose leaf book ring.  You can find the rings in office supply stores.  Cut your paper into rectangles (or any shape of your choice-be creative!).  Punch a hole in the same place on each card.  Write your letters.  I chose to do capital and lower case.  You can do just the capital or just the lower case.  You could also type them up on the computer and print them out-but this took me less than 5 minutes to do!  Now L and his friend B each have a ring of letter cards to flip through!  This ring of letters can be use for many activities besides just flipping through them.

Other Letter Ring Activities:
~Flip to a letter and write that letter. 
~You (the parent) say a letter and have your child flip to it. 
~You (the parent) make a letter sound and see if your child can flip to the right letter.
~Laminate your cards and your child can trace the letters with a dry or wet erase marker.

Other Ring Card Activities:
~Use color paper to make color word cards (red paper with the word RED, yellow paper with the word YELLOW-you get the idea).  Your child will learn to recognize the color words!
~Number cards with the name of each number written underneath (write the number 1 and then spell the number o-n-e under it.  Your child will learn to recognize the names of the numbers as well!
~As your child progresses you can make sight word cards, too.
~Name cards with the names of each family member.  You could even make them larger and print off pictures of each family member and then write their name underneath.  Your child will begin to recognize everyone's name!  Kids love to find their name written somewhere!  L loves it when he finds the letter L or any other letter in his name!

BE CREATIVE!  HAVE FUN!  DO WHAT WORKS FOR YOU AND YOUR CHILD!

Magnetic Letters

We have a TON of magnetic letters!  Grab a cookie sheet and you are ready to begin!

L picked out the letters and put them in order.  Since we have so many, next time I will sort out one set of letters-it took him a while to dig through our stash.

 

Magnetic Letter Preschool Activities:  Spell your first name, or other simple words like mom, dad, dog, cat, or non-sense words CVC words (consonant vowel consonant).  If you have a ton of magnetic letters like we do, have your child do a letter match on the cookie sheet. 

Magnetic Letter Kindergarten Activities:  Spell your first and last name, spell your siblings' names, spell your parents' names, or sight words (do an internet search for kindergarten sight words).  Take it a step further and after your child has spelled words with the magnetic letters have him or her write them on a sheet of paper.  Make a word, write a word. 

Magnetic Letter Toddler Activities:  Putting the letters on the cookie sheet works their fine motor skills.  As your child puts the letter on the sheet you (the parent) say the name of the letter and have them repeat it.  If he/she doesn't repeat it right away, that's okay!  The more your child hears the name of the letter, the more he or she will remember it!  Keep it fun!

Simple Skills Activity

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L worked on 4 skills today:  cutting, patterning, letter order, and letter formation.

1) L cut strips of paper into small squares ( I had drawn lines on the paper for him to cut).
2) L chose a patter of blue, yellow, green and laid it out on the floor.
3) L glued the squares into his workbook (I helped him make the frame).
4) Together we wrote the letters in ABC order and glued the card in the frame.  This particular activity helps with the order of things.  He writes one letter, I write the next letter, and then he has to figure out what comes next. 

Letter/Number Recognition Test

Type out a chart with all 26 letters (you choose if you want capital and/or lower case) and numbers-we did 1-10 for now.

Slip the chart into a protective sheet.  Have your child use a dry erase marker and circle letters and numbers as you give them.  

This is a simple way to test if your child recognizes all the letters and numbers.  You can keep track of the ones he/she doesn't recognize so you can work on those.  This can also be used for letter sounds when your child is ready.  Another way to involve your child in the test is to use a deck of flashcards.  Have him/her flip one over, say the letter and sound, and then cross it off of the chart. 

This activity reinforces letter and number recognition.

Addition Subtraction Card Game

A is filling in for L and doing an addition/subtraction game.

Materials:  Deck of cards (minus the face cards), dry erase marker, chart of numbers (as high as you want-mine is copied from a book I already had, but can easily be made in Word or handwritten), plastic sheet protector

Play:  Flip two cards over and add or subtract them.  Mark out the answer. 

Goal:  Mark off all the numbers before you run out of cards.

This activity can be adjusted for any age level.  Use as many numbers as you want and as many cards as you want.  Pull out the smaller numbers to use for a younger child. You can use only addition or only subtraction, or both, depending on what you are working on with  your child.  You can also have two players and use two different colors of dry erase markers or two different number charts.  Be the first to mark out all your numbers.  What if you have already marked out a number and get the same answer?  Be creative! Try subtracting for a different answer. Or place them back in the deck in different spots.  If you are playing with someone else when this happens, this could be your "lose a turn" or "skip a turn".

This activity reinforces counting, addition and subtraction skills, and number recognition.

Letter Match-Up

Using the letter tiles from a previous activity I spread them out for L to match up.  The task was to match the orange letter to the green letter.

After working for a few minutes L seemed overwhelmed with all the letter tiles. So we decided to separate them into two piles.  Now he could see all the orange letters and all the green letters.   

After matching up all the letters, you can take it a step further and have your child put them in ABC order.

Eventually I will make lower case letter tiles and have L match up his capital letters to the lower case letters.  

This activity reinforces letter recognition.  If you complete the last step it also reinforces ABC order.

Letter Matching

For this activity I made a capital and lowercase letter chart in L's workbook:  3 columns and 9 rows.  In each box I wrote the letters in very small writing.  L will match up his letters from the stickers to the letters in the box. 

I also used my small stickers from a previous activity to write the letter sets.  I cut the sheet of stickers in half and used three halves for this activity.  This way he only had 9 letter sets at a time to work with (Aa-Ii, Jj-Rr, and Ss-Zz).

His dinosaur friend kept watch for him.

L working on matching his letters.  In the future I won't write the letters on the paper, but encourage him to figure out which letter comes next.  He still has to sing his ABC's a lot to figure out which letter comes next.  If working with his ABC's has taught him anything, it has at least taught him to say J-K-L-M-N-O-P (before those letters were unrecognizable).

All done!  He worked very hard on this and was proud of his work!