Learning My ABC’s: Five Activities to Reinforce Letter Learning (Aa)

I am currently teaching B4 her letters and their sounds.  She is aware of some of them but I have not done anything formal.  She has begun to ask to learn to read.  Her sister (A6) is now fluent enough that she reads beginner chapter books to B4 and I whilst we are snuggling at bedtime.  B wants to join her!

My goal is to teach her one letter a day, five days a week.  I will be reinforcing her learning by doing lots of hands on manipulative type activities, using things that can be found around the house.  All the activities I share can be done without a printer and of course can be used to learn or reinforce learning of any letter in the alphabet.

Today we began with the letter Aa.  And these were five of the ways she practiced her new knowledge.

• I taped some masking tape to a sheet of paper in a capital A shape and a small a shape.  She painted over the entire page.  After it was covered she peeled off the tape to reveal her letter.  She named it and said its sounds.  This activity helped her to remember what sounds the letter Aa makes:

• Over the weekend T13 gave me back the table he had been using in his room as a desk.  I painted the top with black board paint.  This gave me a great surface for some very inexpensive learning.  Today I drew the letter Aa on to the table a few times.  I gave B4 some dampened Q tips and she ‘rubbed’ the chalk outline out by drawing over the letter with the Q tip.  This activity will help her remember how to write the letter Aa:

• I drew the letter Aa on a piece of card.  I copied and pasted four images from google repeating them five times.  You could use images from a magazine or get an older child to draw some pictures of objects beginning with A (or the letter you are learning).  I cut these into strips and had her cut each apple off and stick it onto the card stock.  This activity reminded her that letters made the beginning sounds of words and that apple begins with the sound a:

• I had made a whole alphabet made from pipe cleaners.  These were to specifically place in the letter basket I would be making up each day.  However, I thought it might give B4 good practice in how to form a letter herself, using the pipe cleaner.  For this I gave her a pipe cleaner, showed her the shape of the letter Aa and asked her to make the same shape herself using the pipe cleaner.  This activity helped her to figure out how the shape of the letter looked and how to replicate it:

• For the final activity I wrote lots of letters onto a sheet of paper, hiding capital A’s and small a’s among them.  I gave B4 a stamp of the letter A and she needed to stamp over all the Aa’s she could find.  This activity was to help her to recognise the letter Aa even when hidden among many other different letters:

A successful start I think!