Letter Activities

So, we've still been slowly making our way through the at-home letter activities that I started with the boys just over a year ago. Cody and Jaden have no problem identifying their letters and can even write most of them now too, but I still enjoy having an excuse to bring out new activities at home. Plus, I'm a finisher, and I'd love to have them complete their tactile letter book that is just 6 letters shy of the entire alphabet. The goal is to complete it before baby arrives! We'll see! :) Here are our latest activities:

Letter S

My favorite activity with this letter was trying Splat painting for the first time. I wasn't sure how messy the project would be, so the boys stayed in their PJs for our morning project. First, we filled the bottom of a leg of pantyhose with a small amount of rice. Then, I taped a piece of paper to the ground. Cody and Jaden each picked a couple colors of paint to squirt on their paper.

Then, it was time to SPLAT the paint!

It took the boys a little while to get the hang of how to use their funny-looking painting instrument, but soon they went to town.

The paint didn't splatter nearly as much as I feared (thankfully) and it made some cool designs, particularly when you could pick out the rice shapes in the paint. This turned out to be quite the fun project!

Here is Cody's final painting, and then Jaden's.

Since the letter S is a tricky one to draw, I used this worksheet from a blog that I love called The Measured Mom to have the boys practice writing a few of their letters. I love the concept of writing the letters large first and then progressively smaller.

For our tactile letter page, I gave Jaden and Cody the option of covering their S with either seeds or stickers. You can see which choice won out -- the messy one!

Since it's October, I did a counting activity with spiders. We used a little booklet from Pinterest that had each page covered with a spiderweb. The boys' job was to use their thumbprint to put a varying amount of spiders on each page.

Then, the boys drew 8 legs on each spider, and Mommy filled in the appropriate number in the blank on each page: "I see _____ spiders." It made the boys proud to have a book that they could read to Daddy all by themselves when he came home.

Finally, we went on a scavenger hunt around the house. I had taken a variety of random pictures around our home such as the following: 

I showed each picture one at a time to the boys from my camera, and they had to figure out where in the house that item was. It turned out to be a much bigger challenge than I thought. Either my photos were a little too obscure or Jaden and Cody just aren't that observant! For some reason, the boys wanted to take their flashlights with them on the hunt. They proudly shone their flashlight on the correct item when it was found.

Letter I

Our first letter I activity had to do with insects. Jaden and Cody each rolled a die and then placed that number of paper insects into their paper jar. 

Then, they counted up the number of dots on each ice cream cone and labeled each cone with the correct cut-out number. Both activities were fairly simple for Cody and Jaden but they seemed to enjoy them well enough.

We used the same clip-art insects for our letter I alphabet book page.

The best activities for Cody and Jaden, though, are always the active ones. The boys loved going on this Inch Measuring Hunt. First, I gave each of them a 1x1 inch square piece of paper to use as a guide. They held up this square next to various objects to test whether or not the object was larger or smaller than one inch. The boys found it hilarious to hold the small square up to extra large items in our home.

 Finding objects that were smaller than an inch was a little more difficult and sometimes surprising. :)

They drew pictures of their findings on a simple chart.

We even hunted for some objects outside, where Jaden thought it'd be great fun to tuck his marker behind his ear. I can't figure out where he might have seen someone do this.

Their resulting charts were pretty cute.

Hopefully we'll share a few more letter adventures again soon!