Laundry Alphabet

In preschool learning our letters is such an important thing. It is the gateway to reading and more.  Well I can not sit them down and drill the letters into them, who would want to learn that way?? lol  So I scour Pinterest almost daily for new ways for the kids to PLAY with letters.  I came across a printable, free activity, a week or so ago that you can use in several different ways.  See original site idea here with printable.   I love when I come across free printables. 

After I printed them and laminated them I tried to find a place in my classroom where I could hang sting for the kids to play with them like the teacher did on her site.  Well I could not find such a place.  So instead I turned a piece of card board into a mobile hanging activity.  I covered the card board with some brown paper and glues on yarn and then glued the clothes pins over that.  I spaced them out for easier hanging.  As you can see everything fits on pretty nicely.  I originally forgot to put the letter "L" on there and one of my students was kind enough to point it out.  :) Other then that it was a fairly easy thing to make. I do have the occasional half of the clothes pin that falls off but i have that same problem when using clothes pins in general with my class. Not really sure why they can't keep the clothes pins together but oh well they go right back together with ease.

Letter Recognition

When I took over in preschool I knew that I was going to need to teach the kids to recognize all the letter of that alphabet.  I had been working on it sort of in the Toddler room but not really expecting much of it to stick.  Well now I needed it to stick. I was going to have to do more then have a letter of the week that we talk about at circle time.

I was scanning through Pinterest, as I always do, looking for fun ways for the kids to play with their alphabet.  I found that several teachers will use clothes pins with the letters on them to work on matching letters.  Here is one example of that:
http://trainupachildlearnaswego.blogspot.com/2012/09/5-diy-manipulatives-for-preschool-and.html 

I took this idea and made a few centers that related to themes we were discussing.

 These are the first letter matching set I made for my class. I cut out the dinos from old file folders and used them to match upper case letters to their lower case counterpart. I had several kids super excited to play with these.  Some kids I had to really encourage to try. But I feel they worked really well.

These I made for Valentines week.  I had the laminated hearts all ready from previous years so it was pretty easy to add letters to the hearts.  I have to say that these were not as liked as the Dinos but I still had a few kids show interest in them.

I used the same set of clothes pins for both matching sets.  I plan to do more matching sets when the inspiration hits.  Right now I am focusing a bit more on Number recognition and counting.  We are having a lot of fun with that.