Inspired Learning

Well, it's almost that time of year again. I still have three weeks of summer vacation left so I'm not trying to make back to school time come any sooner but it is just around the corner. So, allow me to introduce the teacher side of myself. This coming  year will be my seventh year teaching and my third year teaching Kindergarten. I have also taught first and third grades. I would love to use my blog as a place to share teaching tips and strategies. After all, teaching is an adventure and all of my best teaching ideas are inspired from other amazing teachers. Mainly, from the fabulous gals that I work with. Whether you are a teacher or not, hopefully you can find some of my ideas useful for the little ones in your life.

Today I thought I would share some of my favorite early literacy activities that I borrowed from my classroom for Audrey this summer. She is at that exciting age where she is picking up so much, so fast. The best thing about all of these activities is that, to her, they are games that she loves to play.

Here is a simple bowl of letter beads. I ordered these puppies from a school supply catalog and they are so much fun. First of all, give Audrey any small object in a bowl and she is in heaven. These have been served up on plates, bowls, and in cups. They have also been used for stringing on pipe cleaners, which means this is also great for developing fine motor skills. Audrey has been stringing and naming the letters and sounds and has also been using them to spell out words -- mostly familiar names at this point.   

This next activity is a game called Crash that I got from a colleague. Thanks, Liz! It is so easy to make and it is so much fun to play. I wrote all the uppercase and lowercase letters on large wooden sticks. Then, on four sticks I wrote the word "crash". Players take turns choosing a stick and saying the letter name and/or sound. Each one that they get correct they keep; however, if they pull the "crash" stick they have to put all of their sticks back in the container. It cracks Audrey up when I have to put my sticks back!

Learning to write letters can make parents, teachers, and kids want to pull their hair out so this is a genius idea. I downloaded and printed these letter roads from this website. You can do uppercase, lowercase, and numbers. I added green and red stickers to show the starting and stopping point of each letter formation. I threw them in a basket with some Hot Wheels cars and there you have it. Instant fun!

Finally, this is just a Jenga game with high frequency words written on the blocks. I chose to do words but you could write anything on these that your child needs to learn. I pinned this idea from here. We like to play by the original rules where you build a tower and remove blocks and stack them back on top. And, we like to play by choosing a block from a pile and building a tower. I had my Kindergarten students write each word they built, as well. For Audrey, I just have her say the word.

Hopefully, you enjoyed this post and you can use some of these ideas to help your little one(s) learn. This just proves that learning literacy skills can be a fun part of everyday!