Structured Play

This is our Alphabet Puzzle. It is a great puzzle for practice with the alphabet because it shows a community and community members that work. This sparks interest and discussion while putting it together. Joey is not interested in doing activities that he thinks are learning activities. So he is able to have fun and practice motor skills while still learning identifying the letters of the alphabet.  Now I helped Joey find the next letter by singing the ABCs. I was also able to help him find letters by telling him what the picture looked like. Ie: M is a mailman look for the mailman, now look at the letter at the top, that is an M. There it is complete. Joey would not be able to do this alone but was more than willing to do it with me! Eventually he will be able to do it alone!

Joey and I worked on letter recognition and letter sounds with this easy game. (Link to site on week two plans) I wrote the letters into the colored circles. We rolled a die and moved our pieces to the letter.  Once on the letter we said the letter name and the sound or a word that started with that letter. This was as much a number activity as a letter activity. Counting the dots on the die and counting the spots on the game board. The whole game took about 10 minutes. 

Mystery Letters is a fun activity to practice letter recognition. What you do is write letters on paper with a white crayon. Then have your toddler use water colors to paint the paper. And watch to see their excitement! Jake thought this activity was "Magic!" He really enjoyed painting to find the letter. The papers were stacked in alphabetical order. I did not expect him to finish them all in one sitting but he did finish in one day. He took a little break to play but came back to finish up. We will use the papers to spell his name and other common words. As well as putting the letters in order. 

This simple Story Board was created two years ago for Jacob to work on putting together a turkey. It was an easy little way to introduce story boards. Now a couple years later, I decided to take this to the next step. I had Jake put together the turkey and then tell me a story about the turkey. For a pre-writing add on I wrote the story as he told it to me. I did have to prompt him slightly to extend his story and include story elements. Of course, as a pre-writing activity, it is a very simple story but one just to get the idea started that this is how to write a story. By using the Story Board it helps spark inspiration and can be used to stretch the story by adding more detail. 

To do a little name practice this month I decided to put the letters of his name on little pumpkins. I had the pumpkins sitting out on the floor and just asked him to use the letters to spell his name. He just stared at me and told me he didn't know how to spell his name. I reminded him that he could in fact spell his name. We sang his name song to remind him: There was a boy that mama loved and Jacob was his name o', J.A.C.O.B. J.A.C.O.B. J.A.C.O.B. And Jacob was his name o'! He then chose to participate and pick the letters in order to spell his name. For some reason he always forgets the A when spelling his name. I give a gentle reminder and he squeezes it in. After he put is name together, I left the pumpkins out. Occasionally I would walk by and switch them up not saying anything. When he noticed the first time he said, "That is not my name." And proceeded to correct it. From then on I would walk by and rearrange two pumpkins to try to catch h...

As a fun and different way to practice the alphabet I had Jake paint the letters. He really just traced the letters with paint and a q-tip. I wrote all the letters and then had him trace over them. He is not ready to write  all the letters on his own so this is a good way to practice. He gets frustrated with his lack of motor skills when writing so I thought it would make a little practice exciting. Paint makes it much easier to trace and helps build confidence. He really enjoyed this and did not get frustrated at all. He tends to scribble over the letters when using a crayon to trace letters. This did not happen for most of the letters. He did great!

Jacob did a little name writing practice today. He was asked to trace the dotted lines to write letters for his name. This is good practice with spelling as well. I had him say each letter as he wrote the letter.  As you can see he is very choppy and not exactly on the dotted lines. His motor skills are not quite sharp enough yet to be able to hold the crayon and he especially loses control as he works on towards the end. We also did a Missing Letter Name Practice. Both of these ideas came from Cherrios and Lattes ' Play to Write, Write to Read. These are good ways to practice names and writing. He gets very angry if he thinks he made a mistake. See the scribbling. I have to reinforce that it is ok to make a mistake and that everyone makes mistakes but we just keep trying. Practice is the only way to get better. When this happens I cannot help but think of my former students that did the very same thing and proceeded to throw fits and give up. I hope to help Jacob ge...

On our wall at home we have the alphabet letters stretched out. We have a pointer that I have Jacob use to point at the letters and sing the ABCs! This makes it interactive, gets him moving and helps connect the visual of each letter with it's name. I use the letters on the wall not just as decoration but to practice singing as well. My hope is that he will see the letters while playing and it will just be more print exposure. (This is our playroom) After he sings and points I ask him to identify random letters as I call them out. I would say he has about a 80% mastery level for the letters as of now. The best way I have found for him to learn to identify the letters is to put a word to them. The first ones he could identify were M and D- Mommy and Daddy. He was actually so young he didn't know or wouldn't say the letter but point to D and say dada.  Next we put together an alphabet puzzle for more practice. This puzzle is great! It has a little town scene in the ...

We participating in a Wednesday Play Group called Play to Write over at Cherrios and Lattes . This is week 3- Write/Spell Your Name.  We started this week's practice with some name tracing. Cherrios and Lattes provides the printable for some dotted letters. She suggested doing rainbow writing with this sheet. I showed Jacob but he was more interested in writing all the Jacobs. I started by modeling on the first name. Then I held his hand and we did it together. Finally I let him do the last three on his own with only my verbal prompts.  He took this very seriously and was very proud of himself! I was surprised at how much he liked doing this activity. He has a long way to go but he did pretty well! One thing I had to repeat was not to go around the o and a more than once. He wanted to go around and around. This is an activity that I think he will want to do again! The next activity was Missing Letter Name Practice. We started by singing a little song I sing fo...

Today we did some painting! I found the cutest little project that I knew Jake would love over at  Kids Craft Weekly . It is a digger (Jacob informed me that it is a front end loader) that you can put together. Knowing Jacob's not so gentle touch, I decided to do something a little different with it.  He started by painting the loader. It was the first time I have seen him take care while painting/coloring. Usually he just scribbles with the paint brush or crayon but this time he was very careful to stay in the lines the best he could. It was fun to watch him with such focus. Now that he has turned three I see him really changing.  He painted the wheels black and painted around in a circle to fill them. He was not perfect but he certainly took more precision than usual.  While we let the loader paper dry, Jacob decided that he needed to draw some dirt on the paper for the loader to pick up. I then cut out the loader and helped Jake put it together. To...

This week we were were asked to make a Sensory Gel Pad by our Play to Write play date over at   Cheerios and Lattes . Check out the great explanations and tutorials over there. We have already made one so we just pulled it out. Jake does not love to use it. I think he feels he needs a bit more structure to be able to write the letters with his fingers. One option might be to create the gel pad that is clear. He does try and that is all I can ask for! Playing tic-tac-toe was a great idea. That maybe all we need to help Jake learn to like the Sensory Gel Pad! We also did some more line tracing practice. Last week Jake was less than enthusiastic about this so this week when I pulled it out I made sure all my focus was on him (sorry no pictures because of this). I did a couple pages just to give him the idea. He participated and did a great job so much so that he did not need any help. (It is all about the attitude with this dude!) Another option for prac...

I saw this activity on a blog post over at Little Family Fun . I knew it was something we had to do. I thought Jacob would love it! So I made a version of my own. I put my version in a file folder. I wrote the capital and lower case letters at the top and put a road and dump truck at the bottom. I then stamped 2 inch circles with a large hole punch and wrote capital and lower case letters. I chose to do the capital and lower case letters on the same color paper to help him identify the letter matches. I will change this as his skills grow. He is not a guy that likes to work on letters so I do not want to frustrate him. I pulled only the first 5 letters of the alphabet for him to work on today. I drew a line at the bottom of each letter to help him line the letters up correctly. I told him to make sure the line was on the road and he was able to do it without difficulty. He enjoyed this activity with it limited to a few letters. If I extended it he would have lost it! I wil...

So when prepping for this month's activities I accidentally printed the plans 3 times. I hate to waste so I needed to find something to do with the extra copies. I decided to do some name recognition with the shells letters. I cut out the letters of Jacob's name from all three copies. Today, I put them all down in front of him and told him we were going to find the letters in his name and spell out his name with the shells. I did not have a paper for him with his name as a reference but I did model for him what I wanted him to do.  After I put together his name once, he jumped right in. I discouraged him from putting the letters together out of order. Previously I let him do that with the other activities but now that I know he knows his letter it is not about letter recognition but rather name recognition so I want him to put it together in order.  After we put the name together three times I decided to switch it up (he had the skill). This time I mixed the lette...

I cut out the Shell Letters form this month's plans  and laid them out in order. We took turns singing the ABCs and pointing to the letters practicing letter recognition.  He is getting good at letter recognition. I would say he is at about 90% proficiency. While singing the Alphabet he has a bit of trouble pointing to the letters because he wants to sing faster than his finger can keep up. I decided to take it a step further to check for mastery.  I created a game using the letters. I called out a letter and Jake had to find the letter and pick it up. If he got it correct, he would collect the card into a pile. Next, he would call out a letter and I would have to pick it up and put it in my pile. This worked great! We had a lot of fun playing. I started with letters that I knew he knew and worked my way up to harder letters. It did help for me to say, "D, d for Daddy." This really helped for letters he was stuck on. While playing the game Jake started...

I pulled out our name practice tray today. I put our Sensory Box beans into the tray then hid disks with the letters of his name. He got busy scooping the beans looking for the letters. We started by using a paper with his name written on it so all he had to was place the matching letter on top. He can recite the letters in his name and he can recognize letters so the next step is having him put the disks in order without the help of the paper. He dug for all the letters again and placed them on a blank paper. Then we practiced reciting his name before I asked him to put the disks in order. And this is what he did... He was not at all interested! He does not like to be challenged! I like to keep Structured Play time light and fun but I will not let him give up! I do not want him to learn that if something is hard he should just not do it! So I had to be stern while still trying to keep it light and fun. He eventually sat up and tried. He did it himself with me remind...