Ideas and resources
These Surprise balls are literally what they are called – a Ball with a surprise inside. These make for a fun alternative to small stocking filler gifts or gifts for School friends and classmates. Add a hanging cord and hang them off the Christmas tree for a fun pre-christmas count down. Watch the video or check out the photos for this simple guide. Surprise Ball Tutorials.
You can buy surprise balls ready-made on Etsy too.
If you have a little one learning their letters at home or at school, it can be helpful to know a bit about the science that goes into learning your letters and how the experts teach letter recognition.
Knowing the alphabet is the basis for learning how to read, so it’s important to get it down. Kids need to know the differences between letters, to be able to recognize their shapes and to know what sounds the letters make individually before they can start combining them in words.
Proud to Be Primary suggests starting with letters that are meaningful to the child such as the letters in their name. Tracing letters and doing letter matching and other games with letters are great ways to start kids on the road to recognizing letters. Then things like alphabet songs, books and picture cards can be added in to help with phonics and the basics of reading.
This Crafty Mom talks about using the Carnine method for teaching letter recognition, which starts with all lowercase letters and separates letters that look similar to each other (like b and d, or c and e). This makes a lot of sense because it’s not as confusing, and you can learn alphabetical order later.
How Wee Learn uses a slightly different order but the idea is the same, though she also would start with the letters in a child’s name, then go on with the rest of them. This post includes more fun games for letter recognition including digging up letters and taping letters on the floor for kids to throw paper airplanes on.
Looking for more fun ways to learn the alphabet and letter recognition? This Kaboom game from The Many Little Joys is easy to make, fun for little kids, and once you’ve used it to learn letters you can make a new version for sight words, numbers, basic math problems and more.
Early Learning Ideas has tons of letter activities including collages, crafts, tactile letter cards, letter recognition activities and much more. Do one letter a day or a week and your kiddos will know their letters in no time. And be sure to grab these cute printable alphabet books from Life Over Cs, which give kids easy activities for recognizing letters and words that begin with them.
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