I get asked a lot what I do with my toddler for “school”. I thought every once in awhile I would show you all some of the fun things we have done. This post is the first of  a series I will be sharing called- Letter Fun Series!

[box type=”shadow” ]The most important thing I should stress is that learning at this age should be fun and any concepts should be learned mainly through play and great books. Some days she is really in the mood to do some of her school stuff and other days she just wants to play with her dolls, and thats ok! I read her cues and that tells me how and what we are going to do for “school” that day. I don’t think young children need any kind of formal learning routine or schedule. [/box]

Letter A and some fun!

I decided to start with the letter A and work my way through the alphabet with her. Each week  we will go over shapes,colors,letters, and any other fun concept I could pull into our play time together.Each week I will include a sensory try like the one below.

Sensory Tray for Letter A fun-

A sensory tray is just a tray or any container that you fill with several items for self directed play. Sensory Trays help with development of creativity,motor skills, and cognitive development. I love sensory trays and so do my kids! Need some ideas for sensory bins? Check out my Pinterest board for Sensory Bin ideas! 

I found these dry erase flash cards at my local dollar store. We used them to go over some shapes, she had a blast drawing all over these.  While she was drawing on them we talked about shapes and the funny pictures so it really was a great  way to encourage her vocabulary.

Games we played-

One of the games I play with her is called match the letter. I dump out all the magnetic letters on my coffee table and then I wrote all the letters A-Z on my little whiteboard. She picks up the magnets and we match them to the letters on the whiteboard. Some days we get through a good amount of letters other days it is just 3 or 4 and then she wants to erase the letters with her fingers on the whiteboard. Again she is little so its fine. We talk about the letters as she erases them.

Fun Crafts we did-

I let her make a stained glass apple craft. Ok well a toddler version of it at least! I took a piece of construction paper and cut a apple shape out of the middle of it. I took a piece of contact paper and laid the construction paper over it and pressed it  down. The sticky side is facing up  which does two things. It makes the construction paper stick to it and it makes that apple cut out sticky. Which is perfect for little kids to be able to stick paper,pom poms,tissue paper, whatever you can come up with too. I taped mine to the window and let her stick them on. It let the light shine through the apple shape very nicely (thus the stained glass effect). While she happily stuck paper to the apple we talked about apple starts with A, and what the letter A sounds like. We also talked about our recent trip to a apple orchard. It is fun to hear her version of the trip and what she remembers.

Technology we used this week-

We played on Starfall.com this week. I would go over the Letter A with her and then just let her play on it for awhile.

Fun books we read-

We talked about how alligator started with the letter A so I found a couple of cute books on alligators to read to her throughout the week. These are some of them. I loved the one called “May I please have a cookie?”. It talked about how to ask nicely for something, so now when Charlye starts demanding something I ask her- How does an alligator ask for a cookie? She gets quiet and then says please nicely for whatever she is asking for (YAY!). I wrote a separate post on how we used this book to teach some character traits  (Read it here!)

All throughout the week I also tried to point out any shapes or letter A that we came across. I think  a lot of learning should be done in the context of real life so I do this with all the letters and any other concepts I want her to pick up.

Do you need some more fun ideas or coloring sheets for teaching the Letter A? Check out my Letter of the Week Pinterest Board! There are lots of great ideas there!

I hope you have enjoyed our post about some of the Letter A fun we had! What kind of fun ways do you help your kids learn their letters? Tell me about it in the comments! I love to hear new ideas!!

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Linking up this week with Mamade Blog Hop

Letter A fun