So...remember how this preschool is going to be "easy peasy"? Two of the hardest things I struggled with last year, when I was doing our little "practice preschool" once in a while with Luke, were narrowing down all the bajillions of letter ideas online down to what
I wanted to do, and then finding/making time for the prep work that they took.
When I taught middle school, it wasn't unheard of for it to take as long or even twice as long to prep a lesson than it would take to present it, but it worked out fine since I would then teach that lesson as many as 6 times, depending on what classes I had that year. With at-home preschool, there's only one shot. I found last year that when I would spend a lot of time getting a complicated activity ready (and let's be honest, everything's complicated when you're trying to juggle a baby and a toddler at the same time), it was basically no more meaningful or educational or fun for Luke than if I had tried something a lot simpler or predictable. That's not to say that all the awesome stuff (like homemade playdough on up) is off the table - only that I don't hold myself to any kind of standard for that this year. When it happens, it will be awesome. When it doesn't here's the routines I'll fall back on for letters:
Do-a-dot
Totally nabbed this one whole-hog from
Confessions of a Homeschooler (whose blog is a.ma.zing, by the way - it makes me want to homeschool forever). This was Luke's favorite thing in the world that we did last year. It's a great way to build letter awareness and fine motor skills. Once you've got a bingo marker (found ours at the dollar store), all you have to do is print off the dot pages and you're set. Luke also liked (likes) doing them with those cheap dot stickers that you can find near the office supply aisle.
I have a cute photo of Luke with one of his do-a-dots, but I can't find it...trust me, the kid eats them up.
Letter coloring pages
This is another one that you can just print off ahead of time and keep in a folder to whip out by letter. More fine motor skills practice, plus there's a lot of fun options out there. Sometimes I've used the letter-shaped coloring pages, like the alligator below; sometimes I've just gone through old coloring books and torn out pages with pictures that start with the letter (like a picture of a cat when we're working on C).
Tracing pages
More print-ahead stuff. Obviously it may not be effective to try to do all of these worksheet-style things in a row; Luke's great at seat work (or at least he used to be...it's been a long summer), so he doesn't mind two or even three in a row, but age-wise it's a lot to expect a 3 year old to sit still for that long. In any case, tracing pages are a fun option to throw in the mix. Lots of great options available online (there's a few on my
pre-writing Pinterest board if you're looking).
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I guess I should've specficied more clearly that markers
go on paper. But that kind of looks like his
name, right?? How could I be too mad? :) |
Letter workbooks
These are the easiest of the easy. Most of them will have coloring & tracing pages, & sometimes other stuff. There's some cute Sesame Street ones at Dollar Tree if you're looking for simple, or any store like Walmart or Target will have them in the fall and spring. I took one of the dollar store ones apart and put the pages in glossy sheet protectors (the "high-quality," stiff ones work best, but they're spendier) so that he could do them over & over with dry erase markers or crayons. He wasn't super into it sometimes, but it's a nice thing to be able to pull out on a lazy mom day.
Letter stickers
Remember 1998? Remember how scrapbooking was as hot as the surface of the sun? I'll admit that I'm a bit of a hoarder (an organized one, though!), so I still have a huge folder full of letter stickers that I'll never use. You can bet good money that my preschooler is all over that. Sometimes he wants me to tell him letters to spell words; sometimes I'll have him find all the As from different sheets; sometimes he just wants to stick stuff on a paper randomly. It's all good.
Letter hunt
One of the introductory activities we did with each letter was a letter hunt, sort of a hide-and-go-seek where Luke had to find all of the letter Bs (or whatever) in the room. First he would find the obvious ones, like the letter tiles.
Then I would help him find other letter Bs elsewhere in the room, like on the letter line or other posters. Then (and he was never very good at this - we'll keep practicing!) we would look for objects that started with B, like balls, books, blue things, etc. He got very easily distracted doing this since we do preschool in the toy room, but I think he did start to make some connections with letter sounds this way.
Letter toys
I was amazed at how many letter toys we had once I started looking. Even the cute/annoying singing alphabet bus that grandma gave us became a useful part of preschool when I started using it intentionally. You can make a game with letter toys ("Can you build a tower of Ms and Ns?"), ask questions ("Which is your favorite letter block?"), or just make observations ("Wow, look how big the W is. It's so much smaller than the I"). All of it builds literacy.
Build-a-word mats
Okay, so these are not as "easy peasy" as most of the other ideas here, but I think they're probably the most powerful ones for building phonemic awareness. Once a kiddo can recognize most letters, he's ready for a build-a-word challenge. There's a lot of ways you can do build-a-word; one that we've liked is shown below.
I feel so bad that I can't remember the source for this--if anyone finds it, let me know and I'll give credit where credit is due!--but basically you type up a document with words next to a row of squares, one for each letter. Then the kid matches letter tiles (I just stole the ones from our Scrabble game that we never play) to the squares, in the same order as the printed word. It sounds obvious, but it's a HUGE mental leap for kids to see that words are made of letters, and then to build sight word recognition for words they're already familiar with (like their name).
Letter food
There are so many fun ideas for letter-themed snacks out there. Once in a while I'll get creative on my own ("Hey, look, it's C day and we have carrots and cheese!"), but most of the time lunch is stressful enough, trying to figure out what my super picky eaters will actually touch today. Hence the shortcuts:
You can free-hand pretty much any shape in the world into a sandwich...but even though it's fun, it kind of takes forever. Look what I found on Amazon (Walmart has it too) for $10!
Et voila! Letter sandwich du jour!
I also saw these at the store the other day and I couldn't help myself. They're obviously not super healthy, but with some veggies and milk, they can make for a fun snack.
Anyway. I'm sure there are a hundred thousand more letter learning ideas out there - isn't the internet awesome? - but these are a few that have saved my bacon more than once when Luke is begging to "do preschool" and the baby is due for a nap and the house is kind of trashed and I'm already pooped at 9:30am. Lazy, maybe...but definitely easy. ;-)
