Yesterday, I shared some tips for Preschool Learning at Home. If you missed that post, you can access it here. In summary, when planning or choosing activities for your preschooler at home, you want to make sure your activities are as hands-on as possible and are specifically relevant to the world around them. Activities that meet these guidelines will likely have a greater impact on your child's learning.
Today, I want to provide one very specific, easy activity for letter learning at home this week! This activity takes into consideration all of yesterday's tips.
Who doesn't love an Easter Egg hunt? However, there's one difference for this egg hunt... instead of candy or trinkets, you put letters inside the eggs. I know that might sound a little disappointing for the kids, but just explain to them ahead of time that these are special eggs for a learning activity. Surprisingly enough, my children weren't upset at all! It was raining outside for us, so we did our egg hunt indoors, and it was just as much fun!
This is what you will need to do: place a letter inside each egg. I have letter tiles that work perfectly, but you can just as easily write the letters onto small pieces of paper yourself! You will need matching pairs of uppercase and lowercase letters. If you don't have enough eggs for the entire alphabet, just choose the letters your child needs to work on, or has already learned, at this point. To make your activity even more effective, write the consonants in blue and the vowels in red. Hide the eggs, and turn those kids loose!
Once they have found all of the eggs, they open the eggs to find the letters inside.
Then they match the uppercase letters with the correct lowercase letters.
If you notice in the pictures above, we separated the blue letters (consonants) from the red letters (vowels). As I explained in yesterday's post, I have children of different ages (3 and 5) so I have to consider developmental appropriateness for both. My 3-year-old was mainly attentive to matching the uppercase and lowercase letters. The distinction between consonants and vowels was intended to target my 5-year-old's learning.
You may choose to stop with just matching uppercase and lowercase letters, and that is fine! If you want to go a little further, though, you can do a little exercise to help your child identify a, e, i, o, and u as vowels. First, we watched the Preschool Prep vowels video. (My kids love Preschool Prep!) Then we lined the vowels up and watched the video again, touching each letter as we sang it in the song.
So, throughout this sequence, your child will focus on letter naming, uppercase/lowercase matching, and vowel identification. That's a great sequence to support alphabet knowledge, all within the context of hands-on, seasonal "play!"
