Kites, Ladybugs, and Lollipops

While my dad may have been a little less than thrilled that I chose not to "use my degree" in the typical way, I have loved "using my degree" to teach The Kid. I put "use my degree" in quotes because so far I think most of what I've done with The Kid has been common sense stuff. You want your kid to learn the alphabet? You show them the alphabet and train them to recognize letters.

With The Kid, we began by singing the ABCs because she loves to sing. For a while, since it was hard for her to produce the letter names in the song, it was mostly just her hearing me and others sing the ABCs. I used it a lot while we were potty training her. She never wanted to stay on the potty long enough to actually go, so I told her she had to stay seated while I sang through the ABCs. She usually made it till about the letter p before she started going. ;)

Next, I made flash cards of all of the letters. I know flashcards are to some outdated and believed to teach by memorization apart from true understanding, but honestly, she's two. She's not really going to grasp the alphabetic principle right away. By using the flashcards, The Kid was able to see the letters easily and get used to working with them. After going over the flashcards once, she began to ask to "do my ABCs." Since the only letter she remembered was a, after saying "doesn't know" to several cards, she began to take the cards herself, point to them, and mimicking my tone of voice say "What one is that?"

Last week we started to work on individual letters. I started with the letter k because before they moved to Staten Island, her mother had her enrolled in a mommy and me preschool. In the preschool, they were making an ABC book and had covered a-j. For k, we made a kite. She picked up on the letter really well and now recognizes it and can tell you what sound it makes.

This week we worked on the letter L. We started by reading The Grouchy Ladybug. We made a lady bug, but The Kid decided that her ladybug was going to be a friendly ladybug not a grouchy one.

I love how she put the dots in straight lines.
Can you tell her mother and I are just a little OCD?
 We're training her well.

 Next we made a lollipop. This one was  a lot of fun because she got to squish paint with her hands. She loved it! She also colored some k and l pictures. Obviously, she liked the crafts a little bit more.

We also started reading Chicka Chicka Boom Boom and making our very own alphabet coconut tree. I order a bulletin board tree cutout on Amazon. I also found someone who had made a pdf of the letters which I printed out and laminated so they would last. So far we have k and l on our tree. However, The Mom and I decided that we should backtrack and recover the letters she learned in mommy and me preschool because she doesn't remember those. She can identify a and sometimes b, but that's really it. So next week, we'll be covering a. I'm sensing some apple crafts.

 

Sincerely,