Tuesday

Lil’ Letter Caper


 
I strongly believe play is the most important learning a three year old can be doing. That said, I have a kid who is endlessly curious about letters and writing (and books obviously). Claire quickly learned all the sounds in our alphabet over the summer (short sounds for the vowels) and now I’ve introduced the letter names. I didn't follow any formal program -- I just wrote a few letters on the board before breakfast and pointed to them while speaking their sounds. That's it! Our phonics approach seems to be working because we were goofing around with some stick-on letters and I found this:

I wonder what would have happened if I was on my game and had some vowels out?
Pretty cool, right? I handed her an S to begin and asked, “what sound does this make, can you stick it on something that starts with this sound.”

Well off she went! S was stuck on stairs, P for pillow, and the cutest of all  --


C for C-C-Claire.

She put the H on my hat and at this point I abandoned her and a closet door full of letters to attend to my now smoking pan of oatmeal. When I came back into the living room, I found the T on the hat as well.

I would be lying if I said the wannabe librarian’s heart inside me didn’t pitter patter a bit when Claire said, “it has a ‘t-i-h’ sound in it too, at the end part”

Be still my heart, this kid is going to be able to read ME stories soon!
The letter game continued in the kitchen where Claire labeled her bowl with a sticky B and was sorely disappointed I would not allow her to stick another "B" onto her blueberries...or my butt. Sorry kid, I've got to draw the line somewhere and it better be before you figure out what XL might describe.

I'm linking this post up to Writer's World.

4 comments:

  1. This is the funniest way to learn phonics! Very creative. Thank you for sharing

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  2. Laughing aloud here and so glad you introduced yourself at The Book Chook! I have a feeling we may be kindred spirits - in play philosophy as well as butt spread!

    It's such an exciting time when kids take off with words! Well, with any kind of learning. I was a very harried single parent and teacher when my son was small, but though he ate sandwiches for dinner at night, one thing i never missed was reading aloud to him. One night I was so tired I asked him to hold the book. Matter-of-factly he took it and continued reading aloud. I was astounded. "When did you learn to read? Why didn't you tell me?" He frowned at me and said "But you always hold the book."

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  3. @The Book Chook - your son is hysterical! Don't kids just crack you up?!

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  4. I love how you incorporated letters into your play. I know that magnetic letters helped my daughter master them.

    Thank you for linking up to Writer's World, hope to see you link up again!

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