Category: Lesson Ideas (Page 5 of 5)

Pick Two – Lesson Idea #7

April 28, 2008 / Ana / 0 Comments

Have a collection of pictures ready – including many that rhyme.
Choose three pictures to show two your child and make sure that two of them rhyme. For example have a picture of a tree, a box, and a bee.
Name each picture together and ask your child to pick the two pictures that rhyme.
Start over and repeat as many times as is fun!

You can make this harder by adding more pictures and having them pick 3, 4, an so on. Or you can have them choose the pictures and make you pick two that rhyme!

Sack Sounds – Lesson Idea #6

April 28, 2008 / Ana / 0 Comments

Get a sack or a bag large enough to hold several items.
Have your child go through the house and fill the sack with several random objects.
Meanwhile or beforehand, lay out some alphabet cards in a long row from A-Z on the floor or table.
When your child’s bag is full, have them sort the objects by placing them under the alphabet letter that matches its beginning sound.

You can change this up by assigning a set number of items they must find for each target letter – great for review!

Letter Hunt Alphabet Book – Lesson Idea #5

April 25, 2008 / Ana / 0 Comments

You’ll need some newspaper, magazines, catalogs, coupons (any other print material you don’t mind cutting up) and some art supplies (construction paper, glue, scissors, markers, etc.) This one can be worked on over time – so it may take your child a while to complete the whole book. Part of the book can be created while you’re working on letter recognition and the other part can be completed when you work on letter sounds – so there will be two parts to this activity. Some of you may choose to do both pages at the same time – it’s up to you!

Part 1 – Page 1 for each letter

Have your child hunt for and cut out several (up to 20) versions of the same letter (capital and lower case/big and small fonts) from different print material. You want these to look different so that your child learns to identify specific letters no matter the font or size.
Label one piece of construction paper with the target letter at the top. Then your child can glue these letters onto the paper in any way they like as long as they are readable. Although it looks best when the letters are all mixed up and spaced out to cover the whole page, by all means give them creative freedom.

Part 2 – Page 2 for each letter

Have your child hunt for and cut out pictures that begin with the target sound from the various print materials. Review the pictures your child found and discuss whether they’d be good or not to use for that letter.
Your child can then glue the chosen pictures onto another price of construction paper. You can label each picture with a marker (have him/her dictate the names of the pictures to you or help them out). These picture serve to reinforce letter-sound correspondence and build their vocabulary.
Repeat Part 1 and Part 2 for every letter in the alphabet.

You can put the pages together several ways: punching holes and tying it together or using rings, staple it, have it bound at an office supply store, etc. I do recommend that you get the pages laminated if possible. This book will be a great addition to your child’s library and is a lot of fun to make!

Alphabet Cereal Game – Lesson Idea #4

April 23, 2008 / Ana / 0 Comments

You’ll need some alphabet cereal and a simple grid that has the letters of the alphabet separated into individual boxes.

Give your child the grid and a cup of alphabet cereal.
Have them sort the cereal by putting the cereal letters into the letter box on the grid that matches.
Let your child eat the letters when done!

This is an excellent hands-on activity that teaches and reinforces letter recognition. It makes a yummy treat too!

Word Switch – Lesson Idea #3

April 21, 2008 / Ana / 0 Comments

You’ll need a pocket chart and some word cards (you can make them with sentence strips) for this activity.

Make or use some words cards to make up a few sentences from a book, rhyme, or song that your child is familiar with. Make sure to include capitals and punctuations.
Read the sentences aloud to your child (or together if they can read with you). Then mix up the words in each sentence and read them aloud again.
Your child will most likely start giggling and tell you there’s something wrong. Act surprise and like you don’t know what’s wrong. When they convince you that there’s a problem, ask your child to help you make the sentences right again. They can use the capital letter and the punctuation mark as hints.

You can skip the materials if you don’t have them and use a white board instead. Although kids really enjoy holding and manipulating the word cards – especially if they can’t write yet. The purpose here is to show your child that each word has meaning and that they work together to make sentences. If you move one or all of them around, it will affect how the sentence makes sense.

Sentence Switch (Sequencing) – Lesson Idea #2

April 20, 2008 / Ana / 0 Comments

You’ll need a paragraph from a book, magazine, or article (this works best if you type up the individual sentences of a paragraph and cut them to make sentence strips).

Read the chosen paragraph together aloud or have your child read it to you from the original publication.
Next give your child the mixed up sentences and have them try to put them back into the correct order.
Have them read it aloud to check if it is correct and makes sense.

You can make this activity more challenging to meet your child’s need or for older kids. You can do this by not letting your child read the original paragraph before asking them to put the sentences in correct order. Even harder: You can also take an article, cut up the paragraphs, and have your child try to put the paragraphs in order to make the article make sense. Treat this like a puzzle and they’ll love the challenge!

Digital ABCs — Lesson Idea #1

March 5, 2008 / Ana / 0 Comments

Over the weekend we were visiting some friends who have a three year old, and we were talking about activities parents can do with kids his age to prepare them to be successful readers. One of the ideas we came up with was to go on a walk or hike with a digital camera. The mission/game in this activity is to get the child to take as many photos as they can of things that begin with a certain sound (phoneme). The game can be played a different way for more advanced kids, who you can ask to take photos of things that begin with a certain letter.

In the first game we’re working on phonemic awareness, so if we’re trying to find things that start with the /f/ sound, a phone booth is a great photo. In the second game we’re working on phonics (connecting sounds with letters), so the phone booth becomes tricky. It would be a great photo if we’re looking for things that begin with the letter “p”, but not if we’re looking for things that begin with the letter “f”.

You can even make this a math activity by having the kids count the photos, add the correct and incorrect answers together, subtract incorrect from correct, etc.