Leap Frog Fridge Phonics

This is always a great introduction to our letter of the week. I placed the letter J into it, and we listened to Scout’s song about how it sounds. Honey Pot was pretty consistent in naming this letter on her second guess all week. She always called it “I” first! Hey, it’s a start!

J is for Jellybean – Color and Pattern Matching

I quickly created a template of jellybean shapes, using regular printer paper and colored pencils. I made sure to match the ones in a bag I purchased for her from the Dollar Tree. Honey Pot wanted to eat them of course, but I told her that she could only eat the ones she’s sorted. It was good motivation for her to match them all up! The solid colored candies were the easiest for her to do; but this was her first pattern exercise, and she needed more help with the polka dotted ones!

Alphabet Search

I found this neat idea from a website called Tons of Fun. They have free printable alphabet paths for each letter of the alphabet! These contain both upper and lowercase though. Since we won’t be covering lowercase until our second time through the alphabet, I used their general uppercase template, and replaced a few other letters with more J’s. There were about five total for her to find and dot with her marker. She started off pretty well!

But she soon went dot happy toward the end and just wanted to make artwork out of it! I think if we do this again (which I hope to do!) I’ll make my own alphabet path with fewer letters to search through. It seemed like a daunting task for her at this age.

Play-dough Shapes

We like to use our cookie cutters during our letter units!

This time we also took it a step further, and practiced actual play-dough sculpting. We made “snakes” and tried curling them into J’s.

All in all, I think this was a wonderful extension of our usual play-dough letter recognition activities!

J is for Jell-O Painting!

For our last letter unit, we had a lot of fun with our ice painting! I wanted to do something similar this week, so I decided to use Jell-O as paint. First I freehanded a big letter J onto paper, and then I mixed some Jell-O with water, in two different colors, for Honey Pot to color it in.

She enjoyed the new medium!

And of course, we had to use other senses to explore it. It smelled so good!

Here is her finished product. I wasn’t going to put it up on her artwork wall, as I try to keep only the most interesting pieces there…but this just smells so good! I think I’ll keep it around for a while.