For the Love of Letters! (and Numbers...)

Whenever I need a quick and easy to prepare homeschool activity, I know I can count on my toddler's love of letters. We have not exactly done a "letter of the week" this year, but I have introduced alphabet letters, one at a time, over the course of the last several months. I have chosen a specific order of introduction based on studies of child development and early literacy. That said, I do not drill or push worksheets or even have a goal in mind of my toddler being able to recognize letter names and sounds at 2 years old. He does recognize a good number of letters by name and some sounds. Most importantly, however, he loves learning and playing about them! If you've followed our alphabet posts in the past, you'll see how I utilize a multi-sensory approach to introducing both English and Hebrew letters. We do some crafts, some sensory play, some learning activities and a lot of repetition/predictable routine (like the songs we sing when introducing letters or certain materials used to introduce them). Here are a couple of our recent alphabet adventures (along with some of the numbers and counting themed activities we have incorporated as we learn about Sefiras Ha'omer):

Our Munch Monster is a favorite material that I bring out repeatedly for learning new letters. He loves to eat our letter of the week (in magnet form) and proudly displays his favorite "food" in sticky-note form whenever a new letter arrives. 

Mmmm, letter Qq! Quite delicious!

Q-tip painting was a fun (and fine-motor-developing) way to decorate our letter Qq page.

Half of the fun was exploring color mixing, using Q-tips to stir several colors of paint together in an ice cube tray.

Dinosaur collage and plastic dinosaur stamping for letter Dd

We display our letter art for a short while and then it gets saved inside the alphabet book we've been working on inside this binder over the past months. There are many great ways to preserve work like this. You can make your own alphabet book or even laminate your letters for play-dough mats (another great way to practice pre-writing).

Sometimes our letter of the week will incorporate our current theme (we were learning about dinosaurs when these letter Dd projects were made). Other times, I may choose a letter-related theme that my son is particularly interested in. He is right now very interested in zoo animals since we have purchased a membership to our local zoo. That seemed like a great theme to incorporate into learning about the letter Zz this week!

It was the 14th day of the Omer, and we counted 14 zoo animals!

This time, we used a favorite alphabet board book to introduce our letter of the week and my little letter lover immediately found his toy zebra to match the picture on the page!

Even baby brother gets in on the fun and learning with a zoo-themed setup on the activity mat. I recently printed out and laminated the whole alphabet onto colored printer paper to use for just this purpose. Both brothers are enjoying it!

Z stamping and zoo stickers on our letter Zz page. 

Sometimes our letter learning is intentional and at other times it happens naturally. We might point out that zipper begins with our letter of the week as we are zipping up a coat to go outside. While doodling on paper, we might notice a zigzagging line. My greatest feeling of "success" comes when I hear "p-p-p P!" from my little guy who is snacking on potato chips in his car seat and recognized the letter P on the bag! He also loves pointing out letters on signs, trucks, in the grocery store and beyond. As long as he is motivated and interested, I know his love of learning will carry him toward development of literacy skills all in due time. For now, we are learning a lot and happily playing here!