Letter of the week - E

Our little Alphabet tour stopped at  E this week at the request (who knows why???) of Aidan. I like that he is excited about doing a letter though and that he shows interest in whats next.

So as always first project was the actual letter we are doing, I try to make it something represented by that letter so this week we had eyes. Now normal Mums probably would have bought the eyes on a sticker roll, but NO not this thrifty Mummy! I spent one evening drawing, colouring and then cutting out each eye on blank stickers!

A great resource I have found is the TES a quick search and I discovered lots of activities relating to Elmer the Elephant including a brief powerpoint of the story and a counting sheet for Elmer's coloured patches. We read the book and then did some of these activities, the book also gave us the opportunity to talk about everybody being different and how it was cool that we are! 

Another good site I have found is Magic Town which has livebooks, stories with animation and also games that you can play like matching and jigsaws. It's free to register and this gives you access to 6 Live books, of course for a fee you can get lots more, but we were happy to discover Elmer was included in the free ones!

Aidan's Elmer made from tissue paper and some VERY basic drawing by me!

 I've been reading a lot lately about Sensory play and have got some fab ideas for the Letter of the week, all the sites I have used for ideas are listed here. I got out the Playdoh and Aidan spent ages squishing it and moulding it, we chatted about how it felt soft, cold when it came out of tub, warm once it had been played with.

 Using cookie cutters we made Es, and also moulded some "freestyle" ones along with some dubious looking elephants!

Dubious looking Elephant, one of many!

Earth

Look Mummy an Elephant trunk!

I think by the cheesy grin we can gather he enjoyed his playdoh time :-)

 

 As we finally had some dry Weather here we made our way out into the garden and played a simple game I found on a great website called The Imagination Tree. I chalked letters that I knew Aidan would recognise onto our patio, (28 week pregnant Mummy got to sit down for this one!) and I then shouted letters out that he had to jump to.

Excuse the shadow!

To mix it up a bit I also shouted out words that began with the letter eg "egg" and he had to find the letter it started with, I then also did it with the letter sounds.

Mid air!

 After we had played like this for a while he grabbed a piece of chalk and began tracing over the letters I had made, I would love to say I thought this up and prompted him but nope he did it himself! Again I find it wonderful that he pushes himself to do new things and gets excited when he achieves them.

Mine is the blue, his is the pink and I think he did a great job.

I was keen to get in some maths type activities and came up with a simple sorting exercise using googly craft eyes! I put lots into a bowl and asked Aidan to sort large and small into 2 seperate pots.

After this we did some pattern and sequencing work, I started a pattern and he finished it then we swapped over and would you believe it silly Mummy couldn't always do it and needed help ;-)

This was followed by a little bit of Eye measuring, counting the differences between small eyes and large eyes.

 

Last craft we did was to make an Elephant visor, as with the Tiger we did I got it in a kit from Baker Ross. Aidan manages to do all but the very fiddly bits and is always pleased with his results!

Look at the concentration

Modelling his Visor!

Activities I had planned but we didn't get round to:

Decorate and post envelopes

Make a papier mache Earth

Exercises

Paint Eggs

Make some funny Ears

Look at how an engine works

Make and Eye patch like a pirate

We watched:

Dumbo

We read:

Elmer the Elephant by David McKee

Elmer and Butterfly by David McKee

Next is letter M!