Play School - Letter A

For our second week of Play School we focused on the letter A.  Now I realize that 24 months is awfully young to try to teach letter recognition but my son Alex is fascinated with letters right now!  He already recognizes about 10 of them, he is always pointing to letters.  We have this Leap Frog Fridge Phonics toy
                                                          
and he has learned letter sounds from playing with it so much.  The kid only says a few actual words but he can tell you what sounds most of the letters make.  I am hoping that practicing those sounds will help him bridge the gap to forming more words.

Here are some of the things we did this week....

Books:
Since this is our first "letter of the week" we focused on books that introduced the alphabet.

Alphabet House by Nancy Elizabeth Wallace
ABC An Amazing Alphabet Book by Dr Seuss
ABC Dinosaurs by the American Museum of Natural History

Activities:

As we go through each of the letters in the alphabet it is my goal to have each boy make their own alphabet book.

For this first page we did "A" is for apple.  I prepared two pieces of brown construction paper for the kids ahead of time.

When we were ready to start I handed each boy a sheet of red paper to tear up into little pieces.  I thought that would be a huge hit with them but they actually had a hard time so I ended up tearing the paper for them.  

Next I "helped" each boy squeeze a bunch of glue around the middle of the apple and let them spread it around with a q tip.  Aaron enjoyed playing with the glue most of all. 

After they spread the glue out they stuck on the red pieces of papers to make a sort of apple collage.

 Aaron had fun with his craft as he almost always does but Alex, also true to form, wasn't all that interested.

Alex was very interested, however, in the next toy I brought out.  Like I mentioned above, Alex loves his fridge phonics and he loves this other Leap Frog toy....

So he enjoyed listening to the letter sounds and searching out different letters on that.  This toy is a little different from most in that the prominent letters are lowercase instead of uppercase.  That is of course a little tough for them at this age but I they did fairly well I thought.

Our last activity was another one I made up ahead of time.  I made laminated mats (using contact paper) with each boys's name on it and gave them each a set of "cards" with the matchingletters to make up their names.  I called out letters to find and they looked for them and put them on their mats.  We've done this one a couple times this week already and they are getting pretty good at recognizing all the letters in their names!

Song Time:

This week we did song time instead of outside time and we (I) of course sang the alphabet song.  These guys love to hear my horrible singing voice so that led to several rousing renditions of Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes, and Itzy Bitzy Spider.

Overall, this week wasn't as resounding a success as Week 1.  The boys had a hard time listening to me on Monday so I ended up scrapping "school time" that day and reconvened on Tuesday.  Tuesday went much better.  I am very glad I decided to keep the weeks' materials in a tote box in the living room because we've been able to revisit the items throughout the week when they are interested.  Today I'll have some coloring sheets for them to do when they wake from their nap.

Halloween is up for next week's theme and I've got a lot of fun things lined up some I'm hoping for a great week of playing and learning. :)

 This post is linked to Artsy Play Wednesday, click over for other fun art/play ideas!