Seasonal

Picture Book

I know you must have so many pictures on your computer that get stored over time into various files.  Well today, I am going to ask you to open the files and print the pictures.  I know I know, crazy thought that you might put your pictures to use, but hey, your kids will thank you later.

For the sake of this activity, print a handful of pictures, individually, into a word document.  After you print each image out (one image per page), you are going to ask your little one to help you put the events in order.

Let’s say you choose your Easter Day File.  You will ask your little one to remember Easter day.  What did we do FIRST on Easter?  And then?  Etc.  until all the events follow some kind of sequence.  After sequencing the images, you will assemble the pages into a little “booklet” by stapling it on the left side a few times, or hole punch, fastening with ties (however you want to do it as long as it opens “like a book”).

Then, you will ask your little one to help you write a story about your Easter Day, a sentence for each picture.  You will practically just write verbatim what he/she tells you, unless you would like to take the opportunity to “re-phrase” it to make it “sound more like a book,” but re-reading it later using your child’s words is a really special keepsake.

I am going to use my neice’s pictures from Easter from four years ago using my words to give you an example of what I mean:

Mmmm….The Easter Bunny filled my basket with candy.

I got ready for church in my new Easter dress!

When we got back from church, Mommy and Daddy let me dye Easter eggs!

Before I went to bed, I dressed up like the Easter bunny and ate my bunny snack.

*This activity of book-making is a great way to teach sequencing, model writing, and introduce print concepts.  Book-making using your child’s pictures in place of illustrations also makes print more meaningful to your little reader.

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Easter Egg Match

Today I have a cost-efficient activity for all of you frugal moms who are gearing up for Easter and have one too many plastic eggs lying around.

The only materials you will need are the plastic eggs that break apart and a sharpie or other permanent marker. You can also use a dry-erase marker if you want to be able to change what you write on the eggs, but this wipes off easily when handling. If you don’t have any plastic eggs you can find them for super-cheap at The Dollar Tree, Walmart, and almost anywhere around Easter-time. But if I had to guess, some of you saved some eggs in an Easter box from last year because you didn’t want to throw them away.

Take those eggs and write a capital letter on the top half of the egg and a matching lower case letter on the bottom half of the egg. There are two games you can play with your little ones:

The first is to separate all the halves and mix them up and ask them to find the matching letters and connect the eggs.

The second is to fill the eggs with candy or objects around the house that start with that letter. For example, I put a candy egg in the letter “E” egg.

You can vary this activity in many ways to make it age-appropriate for your child: Casey shared the idea to place a letter on the top half of the egg, turn it and write another letter, turn it and write another letter.  Then, write a word ending at the bottom half to see how many words they can make  by turning the top half of the egg (c-at, b-at). Or, you can even write names on the egg and have your child write someone a tiny note and stick it inside of the egg to deliver it to them as an Easter surprise. Be creative and have fun!

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Color the Gingerbread House

This is one of the first phonemic awareness activities I am posting for pre-readers.  If you try to introduce this activity and your little one is not quite getting it, go back to some of the earlier reading posts on the “getting started” page and practice more activities similar to the earlier skills because your little one may need more time playing with words before he/she is ready to listen for the beginning sounds in words. 

Listening for beginning sounds, generating beginning sounds, and identifying which letter makes that sound are three SEPARATE skills.   So today, we are going to start with the basics of introducing phonemic awareness (which is the awareness that words are made up of sounds).

I created an activity in which you will talk about all the objects in the picture so that you can label the objects with your child BEFORE attempting to listen for the sounds that the words start with.  Once children are able to “play” with words enough to hear sounds.  They usually hear the beginning sound first, then the ending sound, and then the middle sound(s) eventually.  It takes A LOT of practice listening for the beginning sound before a child can hear and distinguish other sounds within a word. 

But this is a great place to start: 

Click on the link below, print it, read the directions and let your child choose what they want to color with -crayons, colored pencils, markers, etc.

Color the Sound

If you dont have a printer, free-hand this picture on a blank sheet of paper 🙂

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