alphabet Archives - JDaniel4s Mom

STEM Christmas Building Shapes with Stickman Activity

December 6, 2018 By Deirdre

The wonderful Christmas book The Stickman inspired this fun STEM Christmas building activity. Your children will have fun building basic shapes with sticks from outdoors, Lincoln Logs, or popsicle sticks on the free set of shaping building mats.

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If you have not read the story Stick Man to your children, you will want to read it to them. They are going to love hearing about all he goes through as he tries to return to his family. By the end of the book, Stickman does make it home just in time for Christmas. Your children will be cheering him on from the beginning of the book to its very end.

Getting Ready for this STEM Christmas Activity

The first thing you will need to decide is what type of stick your children will use to build. As I mentioned above they could use Lincoln Logs, sticks from outdoors or popsicle sticks.

You will notice that we used popsicle sticks for this activity. They were ready to use and didn’t take any preparation work.

Next, you will need to download the STEM printable set Learning Shapes with Stickman. You can open the setup with Acrobat Reader.

Finally, you will need to decide if you want to print them in color or black and white. If you print them in color, the details of Stickman, the sticks and the border will stand out.

Exploring the STEM Christmas Activity

Your children can work on building the shapes in the set in a variety of ways. Let me share with you some of the ways I came up with. You will probably come up with a number of ways on your own too.

Center Activity

You can set out a bunch of sticks and the mats you want your children to work on in a center. They can work on building them on their own or with a partner.

You Build and I Build

Young children might have fun building each of the shapes with you. You can take turns placing a stick on one side of the shape. They may have trouble placing them right on the stick on the mat. That is totally okay! The goal of this activity is to learn what each shape looks like.

Talk and Build

You can give each of your children a bunch of sticks and the same work mat. As they build you can have them share how many sides each shape has. You can also have them talk about how long each side it. Once the shape is built, you can ask them to share with you things that they think of that are that shape. They may suggest objects they remember seeing in the book.

More Building Activities

Here are some more great building activities your children can explore.

First, we have a Building Alphabet Letters on the Barn Door activity.

Next, we have an activity we call Building a Playdough Taco.

Then you can explore the Building a Snowman with Household Items activity.

Finally, Building Letters with Crayons will be great to explore.

Learning Letters with Crayons Printable Task Cards

August 10, 2018 By Deirdre

AlphaOops! The Day Z Went First is a fun book about letters switching places in the alphabet. Z really wants to be first and not last.

School supplies are wonderful learning tools. Your children can use pencils as STEM building tools or in Back to School-themed rain sticks. They can use crayons to work on learning letters by using them to form or build alphabet letters.

Getting the Learning Letters Task Cards

You can download your set of Learning Letters with Crayons Printable Task Cards and open them in Acrobat Reader. The set was saved as PDF. The cards were designed to be printed out on a color printer.

After printing out the task cards, you can cut them out. You can leave a little of a white border or cut them out along their blue border.

Exploring the Task Cards

There are several ways that your children can explore the task cards. Let me walk you through the three ways I have come up with. After reading them over, you may come up with several other ways.

Match the Crayon Color to the Crayons on the Cards

There are red, yellow, blue, purple, green, and orange crayons displayed on the cards. Some of the cards have two crayons of the same color. You can give your children the crayons they will need to replicate the letter on each of the cards along with the card you want them to work on.

Recreate the Letters with Any Color of Crayon

Your children can select the colors they want to use to build the letters on the cards you want them to work on. Some children will enjoy having the freedom to build letters using their favorite colors.

Build the Letter on the Card and Come Up with Another Way to Build It

After building the letter on the card, you can invite your children to come up with another way to build the letter. They could use more crayons to build the letter. Children could try to create letters with more rounded edges. They may come up with totally new ways to build the letters.

Here are some more STEM building cards your children can explore with crayons:

Learning Numbers 1-10 with Crayons STEM Task Cards

Learning Numbers 11-20 with Crayons STEM Task Card

Exploring the Numbers 1-10 with Tally Marks

Greater Than and Less Than STEM Task Cards

Building Shapes with Crayons STEM Task Cards

If you like this alphabet activity, here are some more printable alphabet sets you are sure to love.

Building Letters on a Barn Door with Popsicle Sticks (This is a printable set)

Click Clack Alphabet Laptop Computer Match

Spider Web Alphabet Matching Game

Chocolate Chip Cookie Letters

Exploring Alphabet Letters

You may want to have your children explore some books that focus on building and alphabet letters before you have them work on the learning letters task cards. Below you will find some of my favorite alphabet books for kids.

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AlphaOops! The Day Z Went First tells the tale of the day that the letters switched places.

Kids love learning new words. I bet they will learn more food words as they explore the book Eating the Alphabet.

Building Alphabet Letters Kids Learning Activity

May 10, 2018 By Deirdre

This building alphabet letters kids learning activity was inspired by the book Big Red Barn by Margaret Wise Brown. (It has been a favorite at our house.) I couldn’t work on a farm themed printables week without including an activity based on this wonderful book.

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If your children haven’t heard the book the Big Red Barn, will want to read it to them before starting this activity. It shares a day in the life of the animals in a barnyard.

This STEM activity invites your children to build alphabet letters with two sizes of white craft sticks on the barn door. They will need to think through how to build each letter carefully. The letter they build will need to look like the letter and fit on the barn door.

Getting Ready of the Alphabet Letters Kids Learning Activity

There are a couple of things you will need to do to get this activity ready for your children.

First, you will need to download and print out the Building Alphabet Letters Learning Activity.Each of your children will need a barn themed work mat and a set of alphabet letters.

Then you will need to purchase <craft sticks. That you will need to paint white. If you can find white craft sticks, they will save you from having to paint.

Exploring the Building Alphabet Letters Activity

Your children will need to select an alphabet letters and build it with the white craft sticks. They can use whatever combination of craft sticks they like to build the letter. The letter they build will need to fit on the barn door and look like the letter.

Some children may need to try building and rebuilding the letter until it fits and looks like the letter. As they work through the alphabet, they may find that it get easier to build letters.

If you like this farm-themed STEM activity, here are some others you will like:

Telling Time for Sunrise to Sunset Activity

Farm Jokes Code Breaker Printables

Let’s Make a Homemade Balance to Weigh Chickens

Letter Recognition Game with Free Leaf Printable

September 26, 2016 By Deirdre

This seems to be the fall of muffin tin learning activities here on JDaniel4’s Mom. I have shared an apple counting activity, a color matching activity, a skip counting activity, and a number recognition activity. Today I want to share with a you a fun letter recognition game I created to go along with Leaf Man the Virtual Book Club’s book of the week.

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As Leaf Man is blown through the air, he sees a number of wonderful things created with leaves. Things like cows and turtles. Your children will loving turning the pages in this book to see what Leaf Man sees next.

Setting Up This Letter Recognition Game

I created tree with Wikki Stixs on a muffin tin. You could do the same or create design with the letter leaves in the cups of the tin. You could create a giant letter C by placing leaves in the top row. bottom row,and in a column down the left hand side of the tin.

The oak leaf tin letter circles are free to download. After printing it out, you will just need to cut out the letters.

Several Ways to Play This Letter Recognition Game

In each of my pictures you will see a version of the game that focuses on matching lowercase letters to uppercase letters. That is only one of many ways that you can play this game. Below you will find a list of other versions of this game.

Place the uppercase letter in the tin and have your children match the lowercase letters to the uppercase letters.
You can have your children work on the order of the letters in the alphabet by placing letters in alphabetical order. Leave some of the cups empty. Your children can fill in the missing letters.
A few of lowercase letters and there uppercase matches can be stacked in a cup. Your children can place where they want in the tin. When there match come up, they can place it over it buddy its muffin cup.

Here are the books coming up next in the Virtual Book Club. You may want to look for them at your local library ahead of time.

OCTOBER 3

Theme: Pumpkins

Featured Book: Five Little Pumpkinsby Dan Yaccarino. There is a fun new Pete the Cat: Five Little Pumpkins book out that would also be great for this week!

OCTOBER 10

Theme: Farms

Featured Book: Little Blue Truck by Alice Schertle. Big Red BarnBig Red Barn is a great alternate read.

OCTOBER 17

Theme: Spiders

Featured Book: The The Very Busy Spiderby Eric Carle. Miss Spider’s Tea Partyis a cute book you could substitute for this week. It seems to be out of print, but used copies are very inexpensive and it is still likely to be available in libraries.

Letter Recognition Game with Free Letter Leaf Printable

Apple Tree Letter Matching Game

September 15, 2016 By Deirdre

The Virtual Book Club is featuring the book Ten Apple Up on Top this week. I am thrilled to be taking part in the club this fall. I want to share with you two learning activities based on the book. Today I am sharing with you a letter matching game with an apple tree theme. Tomorrow I will be sharing with you an apple themed muffin tin math activity. (If you liked the apple basket muffin tin printable I shared last week. You will love the new one I am sharing tomorrow.

Getting the Letter Matching Game Ready

Before you have your children play the each letter matching games I created, you will need to prepare the supplies. The first thing you will need to do is cut out a brown trunks out of construction paper. Then you will need to cut out three leafy green canopies.

Once you have the tree sections cut out, you will need to decide if you want to display the letters on red round stickers or red construction paper circles. Both materials will work.

Then you will need to write the uppercase letters on the tree canopies and the lowercase letters on the stickers or paper circles. I thought having twenty six letters on one tree might be overwhelming for your children. Dividing the letters up and placing only a few letters on each tree canopy seemed to make more sense.

Finally if you decide to marking the letter game, you will need to get a red Bingo marker.

Letter Matching Game One

The first version of the game focuses on matching lowercase letters up to uppercase letters. You may have seen versions of this letter matching game that ask children to place one type of letter over the other. That is not a bad letter matching game, but it does keep kids from seeing both kinds of letters when the game is done. Our version of the game asks children to place uppercase and lowercase letters beside each other.

Letter Matching Game Two

This game goes end up with the letters being covered up. Your children will need to be told a letter. Then they will dab that letter with a Bingo marker. The goal of this game is to take what they have heard, seek it out, and show that they have found it. Since you are calling out the letter, you will be able to see if they have found the right letter as they get ready to mark it.

If you like these activities, you will find more early learning activities on my Early Learning Board on Pinterest.

Awesome Star Wars ABC Games with Free Printables

May 4, 2015 By Deirdre

Both Star Wars and LEGO are popular with kids. I decided created some awesome Star Wars ABC Games that feature light sabers made of LEGO. Pictures were taken of the light saber LEGO creations so that could be used build alphabet letters. You will want to printout these LEGO light sabers to play the games with your children.

The LEGO light saber printout contains a set large light sabers and a set of small light sabers that can be used for building letters. Some letters may need a combination of larger and small light sabers.

Here are some of the ABC Games You Can Play

Call It and Build It

Two players can take turns calling out a letter and building it. You will need to decide at the beginning of the game as to whether you will be building uppercase or lowercase letters. Actually, you could have players build both if you like. It is just a good idea to decide ahead of time what kinds of letters you will be building. The goal of this game is create the correct formation for each letter.

Alphabetical Order

Rather than randomly calling out letters. Players could have to build the letters in alphabetical order. They can alternate as to who is building a letter. If they need to sing the ABC song to remember what letter comes next, that would fine. Singing the alphabet is a great way to work on letters.

Build the Letters in Your Name

Children can work on building uppercase and lowercase letters as they spell their names. They can work on spelling one letter at a time and then clearing the workspace. If they have short name, they can try building their whole name on the workspace.

Build the Next Letter

This is one of those ABC games that needs two players. One player calls out a letter and the other player has to build the next letter in the alphabet. If your children are just learning the letters of the alphabet, you may want to have an alphabet chart out that they can refer to if they need to.

See what other awesome ideas are being featured for Star Wars Day!

Star Wars Tatooine Desert Sensory Bin– Frogs and Snails and Puppy Dog Tails

Star Wars Family Fun for May 4th – Mama Smiles

Star Wars kids’ embroidery: Yoda quote – Hodge Podge Craft

Star Wars R2-D2 Craft for Kids – Mom-Inspired Life

Light Saber Fine Motor Activity – Something 2 Offer

Make Your Own Star Wars Landscape – Planet Smarty Pants

Yoda Puppet Star Wars Craft – Coffee Cups and Crayons

Awesome Star Wars ABC Games with Printable- JDaniel4’s Mom

Free Play Dough Printable Set for Pretend Play – Life Over C’s

Star Wars Children’s Books – Kelly’s Classroom

Make a Toilet Paper Roll Yoda ‎ – Kitchen Counter Chronicles

Crayon Resist Death Star – Fun-A-Day!

Star Wars Moon Dough – In The Playroom

Light Up May the Fourth Be With You Cards – Left Brain Craft Brain

Star Wars Day Perler Bead Pattern R2-D2 Brain Power Boy

Here are some other LEGO-themed learning activities:

Over in the Meadow LEGO Creations and Book

How long will your boat float?

LEGO Fraction Games

Geometry Riddles Solved with LEGO

Valentine Ideas – Graphing with Candy Hearts and LEGO

If you try these ABC games, please leave me a comment below telling me about how your experiments went or share a picture of it on my Facebook page. If you are looking for more early-learning games, you will find a number of them on my Early Learning Pinterest board.

ABC Learning- Crafting a Bee

April 9, 2015 By Deirdre

Springtime seems to be when the bees start buzzing in our house doing a science experiment. We see them all over our yard. Recently we crafted a big bee to have in our house to display in our kitchen. We didn’t just make a bee craft! We made a “B” craft.

A giant “B” seemed to be almost the perfect shape for a bumble bee. It is missing one of the three sections that a bee has in really life, but we decided to just let that be.

Crafting a Bee

Out of a large piece of black construction paper we cut the giant uppercase “B”, a small uppercase “B” and some antennae. If your children are not ready for this type of cutting yet, you can have all these bee parts cut out in advance for them.

Then my son and I cut six inch long strips out of dark purple and yellow tissue paper. If you have black tissue paper, that would be great. We just couldn’t find any. Again you could pre cut the tissue strips for your children if that would work out better for them.

When we thought we had enough tissue strips, we glued them to our “B”. We talked about how the strips could go horizontally or diagonally, but probably not vertically.

A second letter “B” was cut out. This “B” would be the bee’s wings. White tissue paper was glued to the back of this “B” to add texture and make the wings stand out. When the smaller “B” ‘s glue had dried it was glue onto the big “B”

Finally we added antennae and a eye to the bee. The antennae were cut out of the same piece of paper the letters had been. You could add pipe cleaner antennae instead it you like or go with the construction paper antennae and add pom poms on the ends.

We went with a wiggly eye rather than a paper eye. One because we have some and two it added some whimsy to the craft project.

I didn’t create a craft for every letter of the alphabet with JDaniel when he was little. A number of bloggers have. I have added a bunch of their abc learning crafts and activities to my Working on the Alphabet board on Pinterest. I hope you will stop by and check them out.

Spider Letter Swat- Alphabet Activity

October 18, 2013 By Deirdre

Recognizing letters and their sounds is so important when you are learning how to read. This spider letter swat was made to give my son practice in letter sounds and share words that begin with those letter sounds. This was made for Halloween, but I think it could be used in a spider learning unit any time of the year.

Making the Spider Letter Swatter

The first thing you need to do to make the spider is to gather the materials. You will need a plastic lid a little larger than than swatter, a bug swatter, a pipe cleaner, two large wiggly eyes and a black plastic trash bag.
I cut a four strips out of the plastic bag for the spider’s legs.
The strips were the woven through the slits in the swatter. I tried to space the legs three rows apart.
Two holes were placed in the plastic lid and a small section of the pipe cleaner was placed through the holes.
The lid was then attached to the fly swatter by putting the ends of the pipe cleaner through to holes in the fly swatter in the same row. The end of the pipe cleaner were then twisted down to hold it in place.
A rectangle the length of the head of the fly swatter was cut out of the bottom of the plastic bag. By cutting it at the bottom you have two rectangles attached in the middle.
The plastic bag cutout was placed over the fly swatter with the creased area from the bottom of the bag at the top.
The plastic bag needs to be pulled tight and secured at the base of the flapper or head of the fly swatter with a small section of the pipe cleaner. We just wrapped the pipe cleaner around and around a few times.
Then attach the eyes to the spider’s head. You can place them any where on the head that you want to.

Alphabet Activity

When you have created your spider swatter, you are ready to play the alphabet game. We played a couple of versions of this game. The first was to say the letter and what sounds it can make. I stuck with the sounds you hear when you first say the letter sounds. (Some letters make more than one sound. I didn’t really get into that.)

The second version of the game called for saying a word that starts with that letter sound. We both took turns trying to come up with as many words as we could for each letter. I tried to stick with coming up with new words that JDaniel might not have heard before. It was an attempt to increase his vocabulary at the same time that we work on letter sounds.

The third version of the game was trying to come up with words that end with each of the letters. This was little bit of a challenge, but we were both up for a challenge.

Do You Have Other Spider Ideas?

We have talked about spiders a lot on this blog. We made a spider web trellis in our backyard. There was a spider web themed muffin tin lunch. A math game used rubber spiders and pumpkin seeds.

Book That You Could Read and Explore

Halloween Bugs

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Halloween Bugs: Halloween Bugs (David Carter’s Bugs)is a really special flap book. It is filled with little doors that creepy crawling bugs hide behind. My son loves to guess what is behind each door. I think younger children will be filled with excitement as each door is opened.

This is the kind of book that you might want to read is a fun voice. I love reading it that way.

You will find more early learning activities on my Early Learning Pinterest board.

Do you swat spiders or just enjoy watching them weave their webs?

Bad Kitty (An Alphabet Book)- Read.Explore.Learn.

September 7, 2012 By Deirdre

This week we explored Bad Kitty by Nick Bruel. Bad Kitty really likes to eat foods that are bad for her like chicken cheesecake, jellyfish jelly and nightingale nuggets. When shhe isn’t served what he likes, he does really bad things like overturn her cat box.She really doesn’t want mushrooms, xigua or vegetable stew.

Bad Kitty (An Alphabet Book)- Read.Explore.Learn.

Bad Kitty takes you through words from A to Z. Four times in this humorous book. Once when the good foods are shared. The second time when what bad things Bad Kitty does are shared. Thirdly when the bad foods are pictures and lastly when the kitty does good things to thank her people for the bad food.

What did we do with the book Bad Kitty?

Cat Whisker’s Counting Game

This cat game is a little like the starfish game we played a few weeks ago. JDaniel and I both had a cat who really needed whiskers and toe claws. We rolled a die to see how many we got to add each time it was our turn.

I tried to keep my cat symmetrical and someone else didn’t. The goal was to give the cat a total of twenty. I think we both saw the number twenty differently.

Hungry Cat Kitchen Search

JDaniel and I both had a cat game board. When it was our turn, we pulled a letter out of a bowl. Then we had to find something in the kitchen that started with that letter for the cat to eat. If we found one, we got to move our cat up a square on the game strip.

Remember Bad Kitty liked to eat odd foods and household items. He did in our game too.

More Book Extension Activities

Brown Bear, Brown Bear Mask

Zombie Goldfish Optical Illusion Activity

The Very Caterpillar Activities

Disclaimer: I was sent the book Bad Kitty and an audio cd of the book to review. All information and opinions about the book are my own.

Read.Explore.Learn.- Tweak Tweak (An Elephant with Many Questions)

May 4, 2012 By Deirdre

Welcome to Read.Explore.Learn.! This meme was designed to be a place for you to share the learning opportunities, crafts, field trips, and other activities you have done this week that tie-in to children’s books. I look forward to seeing ways you have learned with and explored books.

Steps:

Link your activity below.

Please place the Read.Explore.Learn. the badge on your post or create a link back to this meme.

Please try to visit at least three of the other people that have placed links below and leave a comment. I will visit each of you and leave a kind comment.

If you are not linking up an activity and are just visiting, please try to stop by a few of the links below.

My Book Tie-Ins of the Week:

The little elephant in the book Tweak Tweak by Eve Bunting reminds me of JDaniel. His mama tells her to tweak her tail when she has a question and just like my guy she is filled with questions.

Does she want to know what the frog is doing? She is jumping says his mom. The little elephant wants to know if she can jump. Her mom tells her that she can’t but, she can stomp.

As she goes on her walk with her mom she wants to know if she can do the same things monkeys and many other animals can do. Each time her mom points out that he can’t do what they can, but she can do special things that elephants can do.

Her mom also tells her she can walk with her mom, ask questions and learn. Oh! and remember the way home.

What did we do to extend concepts from the book?

Elephant Puppet for Retelling

An old cd with felt ears and wiggling eyes makes a perfect elephant puppet. After reading Tweak Tweak, JDaniel stuck his finger through the hole in the center of the cd to add a trunk to the puppet.

Read.Explore.Learn.- Tweak Tweak (An Elephant with Many Questions)

This is so much fun to play with!

It was a lot of fun to watch the elephant’s nose wiggle up and down while he retold the story. I like pretending to be the elephant too.

Elephant Foot Letter Searching

JDaniel used this elephant’s foot to search for letters in his favorite book.

The toilet paper tube was really too large for isolating letters. I will need to think of a smaller tube for this activity.

Sandpaper and Yarn Letter Practice

JDaniel had fun trying to place pieces of yarn onto sandpaper with the letters of the alphabet written on them.

Here is the E for the elephant he used.