Fabulous, Fishy, Letter 'F' Day

As I approached this week’s Calendar Time, I decided to focus on not just learning the letter and sound, but also working on some motor and matching skills.

First, we matched Big ‘F’ and Little ‘f’.

Materials used were: foam with sticky backs, white printer paper, scissors, and a permanent marker. I cut some of the foam into the shape of a tree, stuck it on the white printer paper, cut out some circles to be our fruit, and then used the marker to write the Big ‘F’ on one half  of the tree and the Little ‘f’ on the other half and then wrote some on the fruit. BooBoo Bear liked this activity, though I’ll admit he spent much of it trying to match colors and stack them on top of each other.

When I told him to look at the letters instead he did much better at the activity and really got into it. I would definitely recommend doing this for a child slightly older than he is (3-4).

Then, we went fishing!

Materials needed: felt, permanent marker, wooden rod, twine, paper clips, scissors, magnet, and needle and thread (optional).

I folded the felt sheets in half and then drew the outline of a fish with the tail ending at the fold. I then cut the shape out but didn’t cut the end so there were two fish connected by the tail. Then I wrote a Big ‘F’ on one side and a Little ‘f’ on the other. If I did this again I’d either stitch the letters on OR glue printed letters onto the felt, I think it would look better. Then I stitched up the side of the fish until I reached the middle, inserted a paperclip into the ‘mouth’, anchored it there with some stitches, and then sewed the rest of the fish up. If you aren’t skilled at sewing or simply don’t have the time, you can just slip the paperclip over the moth area to secure the fish together. I do recommend still having the two sides so that the paperclip is fastened securely on.  Lastly, I attached a magnet to twine and then tied the twine on to a wooden rod we had lying around our house from another project.

'Look Ma! It's a big one!'

BooBoo LOVED this one. So much so that I’m planning on extending his collection of things to catch in the coming weeks. I’m thinking boots, octopi, crabs, clams, robots, rockets… the possibilities are endless!

Afterwards we worked on writing out the letters.

Given his age, I knew this was a long shot, but he loves coloring so I went with it anyways.

Look at how he's holding his crayon! It took me until I was in 2nd grade to perfect that grip!

This is being added to all of our future Calendar Time activities. Did he do it right? No. But he tried and he’s recognizing the letter out of context (on random boxes in the house) so I think it’s completely worth the extra time.

 

Some of the F's BooBoo wrote. The top purple one was with help, but the other two were all him... as are the scribbles he produced right after (they are far easier to make after all) 

All-in-all, it was really successful. I love the one on one time I get with BooBoo when we do these and he's really loving learning. He’s still having fun with the matching game from our ‘D’ week and I know we’ll continue using the fishing game for a long time to come.