Letter awareness in Spanish

Literacy begins at birth. The early reading and writing experiences children have help prepare them for later success in school. That's why rich and varied language and literacy experiences at home and in the kindergarten are so important. Children's language learning is rooted in the caring environment of their homes and school. By engaging children in conversations, exposing them to new words, singing songs, discussing symbols and their meaning; and encouraging expression of thoughts, feelings, and opinions through words, you lay the foundation for later language skills success. When it comes to learning to listen, speak, read and write, children must be familiar with language and use it to communicate ideas, desires, and feelings with other people.

During the first years, children are able to recognize the shape and sound of each letter as well as words that commonly begin with that letter.

How to teach Letter awareness in a foreign language?

Introduce the letters of the alphabet by finding a word or a name that is meaningful for your children. For example B is for Bags (school bags), books, blocks, etc. It is important to learn the name, the shape, and the sound of each letter of the alphabet.

Children learn by using their senses. They need not only to hear and look at letters but also smell, touch and taste letters.

Letter shape is important. Show the correct formation of the letter while presenting it.  Children can practice tracing letters in sand, shaving cream, pudding, or fingerpaint.
If you are working with older children remember to introduce the upper and lower case too.

Here are some fun ideas to use with your children

• Paint letters with water on the sidewalk or driveway

• Draw letters with different colours

• Draw letters in whipped cream or dulce de leche

• Use body to make letters

• Make an ABC book of animals, plants, favourites, names

• Build letters with straws, toothpicks, popsicles sticks

• Make a poster for each letter

• Look for letters in magazines or newspapers

• Write letters in sand, dirt, flour, beans

• Build words with clay, playdough

• Go on a letter hunt in the classroom or home

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Play to Learn ~ ABC Crafts

Welcome to this week’s Play To Learn where I’m sharing some of our fun letter crafts that we make each week. As we go through the alphabet we are creating these cute little foam crafts to put in an Alphabet Binder. Later we can flip through the binder and review our sounds and letters.

A is for Apple

This year as you can see we are doing lowercase letters, last year we did uppercase letters. I get most of my ideas from the wonderful ladies at Totally Tots, but I am trying to change them to match our curriculum theme as well. Here are some of our samples thus far…

B is for Butterfly

C is for Caterpillar

E is for Elephant

F is for Fish

These alphabet crafts are super easy to pull together! All you need is a pack of colored foam sheets, a bag of googly eyes, a little creativity and you’re all set! To see more alphabet foam crafts visit Totally Tots!

Those are just some ideas to make the alphabet fun! If you have more ideas to share, or would like to be included in future “Play To Learn” posts, please email me at homeschoolerconfessions {at} gmail {dot} com, we’d love to hear from you!

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Play To Learn ~ ABCs Part 2

Welcome to this week’s s Play To Learn! This week we’re continuing our Part 2 of learning the ABC’s, so here we go! I try to incorporate as many different skills into our letter of the week program as I can, movement, motor skills, handwriting, games, singing, whatever I can think of to make our learning fun!

We do fun things that teach 1 to 1 correspondence. These are magnet pages and I use these magnets from Amazon or pom-pom magnets we made by gluing pom-poms to round magnets found in the craft isle at Wal-mart.

For a fun motor skill activity we do lacing cards, this is a great sewing practice skill as well:

We do scavenger hunts for things that start with the letter we are learning, this was obviously a Letter B box hunt (Sorry about Barbie's lack of clothing, we seem to have a hard time with that over here, not sure about you all?)

And everyone’s favorite, the shaving cream or paint bags! I’ve also tried this with sand trays, salt trays and play-doh.

And of course we do crafts whenever we can!

We do letter collages, and cut and paste and color:

 

We practice writing and pre-writing:

And of course we READ! This is our favorite book Chicka Chicka Boom Boom:

When we’re all done learning each letter, we put it up on our Alphabet Tree to show that it’s been learned!

And just to see where we are I do random assessments where I call out a letter and she dabs it with her Do-A-Dot marker. It’s a fun activity for her and this makes it easy to see what she needs to work on!

Those are just some of many ideas for learning the alphabet! If you want to see more, feel free to head over to Confessions of a homeschooler! Just click on the ABC’s & 123’s link at the top of my blog!

If you have more ideas to share, or would like to be included in future “Play To Learn” posts, please email me at homeschoolerconfessions {at} gmail {dot} com, we’d love to hear from you!

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Play To Learn ~ ABCs Part 1

Welcome to this week’s s Play To Learn! We’re big into our ABC’s over here, so this post is fun creative ways to learn our letter’s and sounds! Ready to get learning?

Our newest venture was with the Wikki Sticks. Normally I’m not a fan of these guys because they get into the carpet, and when I say “into” I mean “INTO”! But, under well supervised use, they are a great learning tool for letter and even shapes, plus they’re fun to mold into different objects as well! I found these super cute Alphabet Fun Cards by Wikki Stix that were perfect for us.

 

I also like to mix in motor skills at the same time we are learning our alphabet, so we do things like our large floor cards. My daughter hops on a card and says the letter or number or I’ll tell her to hop to one.

We do lots of letter matching to help with recognition, in this case she I wrote uppercase letters on clear spoons, and lowercase on white spoons. She then matched them to an alphabet sheet.

We love our 11 x 11 Pin Geoboard, we use it to make letters, numbers, shapes etc!

Here she matched lowercase magnetic letters to a page with uppercase letters on it and below she matched uppercase to uppercase. You can vary this activity depending on your child’s skill level.

We also do logical thinking games as we learn each letter such as puzzles, patterns, size sorting and reproducing a patterned image:

I like to try and keep it fun, so we play games such as the below alphabet game which also helps with counting and number recognition!

 

Here she is sorting vowels from a stack of different alphabet manipulatives and grouping them on the correct vowel circle:

  

Here I had picture cards and she matched the beginning sound letter to the image:

Those are just some of many ideas for learning the alphabet. If you want to see more, feel free to head over to Confessions of a homeschooler. Just click on the ABC’s & 123’s link at the top of my blog. And don’t forget to come back next time for ABC’s part 2!

If you have more ideas to share, or would like to be included in future “Play To Learn” posts, please email me at homeschoolerconfessions {at} gmail {dot} com, we’d love to hear from you!

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Alphabet: The Letter Z

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Would you believe, we finally made it to the letter Z!

It has been fun to take a look at each of the letters of the alphabet and many of you have also been exploring the ABCs on your own sites. We will look forward to continuing to feature alphabet letters, in a new fashion, as we look at the topic of letter identification in the future.

United Teaching went on an ABC adventure where Z sent them to a series of fantastic zoo ideas including a zoo of blocks, a zoo in the sand, zoo matching, and more. This post also shares a week long lesson plan.

Pocketful of Posies has a Z post that includes a sample lap book, as well as the printables to put it together.

She also shares a fun zebra color matching game and "I'm a Little Zebra" sung to a popular children's tune.

Counting Coconuts also worked with the letter Z a while back. Their activities included zebras, cooking with zucchini, zig zag Zs, and Zen.

Set up a zipper center to practice this important skill while reinforcing the Z sound.

Walking by the Way has an informative post outlining their Z is for Zoo lesson.

You may also be interested to look at the list of books Erica has picked for teaching the letter Z.

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Play To Learn: Phonics Fun Part 2

Welcome to our Play To Learn series where we’re continuing more phonics fun from last week!

Boggle Jr:

Boggle Junior: This game is wonderful for beginning readers. You can cover up the word, try to spell it, then uncover to check your work! When we first started, we left the word uncovered to help get the hang of it. Now that we’ve started reading we cover them up!

Blend Ladders:

Blend Ladders and Magnetic Letters: We use these for early reading practice. Once we learn the blends for each consonant, we use magnetic letters or dry-erase markers to put on an ending consonant and make a CVC word! Click here to Read more about how to use Blend Ladders.

Click here to download the blend ladders

Flip Phonics:

Flip Phonics: This is a great flip phonics board. I made it using a file folder that I folded into a triangle shape, the glued and taped along the bottom. Hole punch the top 3 times, and put in a d-ring and attach the letters and voila! We see how many silly words we can make in 5 minutes (Set a timer, its more fun!)

You can download your own copy of the Flip Phonics game from The Homeschool Highway blog.

Shaving Cream:

Shaving Cream Spelling: Grab a can of CHEAP shaving cream, spray a little on your counter and mix in some food coloring for fun and voila! You have a blank canvas great for virtually anything! We do handwriting practice, math problems, make shapes and draw pictures! (Provide a bowl of water and towel to clean hands as needed! P.S. don’t worry it cleans very easily!)

Paint Chip Phonics:

Paint Chip Phonics: I found this fun idea on The Snail's Tail. It’s a great way to practice consonants, blends, digraphs and common word families. Click here for a tutorial on making the cards.

Word Block Phonics:

Phonic Blocks: I found this wonderful game on The Crafty Classroom and immediately LOVED it! I’m all about anything that can make learning more fun, colorful, involves paint…and a trip to the craft store ;o) I also made a word chart to use with the game, we played with a timer to see how many words he could make in 3 minutes. Click here to see how to make the blocks.

You can download the word worksheet here.

Zingo Games:

Thinkfun What's Gnu: This is a fun game for CVC word building! We also have ZINGO 1-2-3 which is the same concept, but a numbers game. And regular Zingo which is a matching game.

Preschool Phonics:

We use Large Letter Print outs to trace, make patterns on with 1” color cubes, you can hole punch them and lace with yarn.

Magnetic Alphabet Book: I found this fun book at TJMaxx for $4.99! It is a magnetic alphabet book, and they match the letter to each picture.

11 x 11 Pin Geoboard: We use these to make letters, numbers, shapes and designs!

Paint Bag: Simply fill a Gallon Ziplock bag with paint or shaving cream. Smooth out onto a desk and use to practice writing letters in, only NO MESS!

Letter Bead Lacing: This is a great fine-motor-skill and phonics game. Give them a card with the word written on it so they have a pattern to follow, and lace the letter beads for whatever topic you’re working on! I got these small letters at Lakeshore Learning, but you can also find square letter beads at any hobby store such as Michael’s, JoAnn’s or Hobby Lobby!

Foam Letter Builders: This is a fun way to learn your letters! I cut the pieces from foam, but we also have a set of magnetic ones. Click here to learn more and for a template download.

Those are just some of many ideas for Phonics fun! If you have more ideas to share, or would like to be included in future “Play To Learn” posts, please email me at homeschoolerconfessions {at} gmail {dot} com, we’d love to hear from you!

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