Letter of the Week

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So, there is a lot of controversy over whether to do letter of the week or not. Really, there is. I can see the validity of both sides and have tried to take out the repetitiveness and implement more meaningful activities.  But, ultimately those who oppose the letter of the week idea, would rather the learning is part of something bigger, and has the whole alphabet being learned on a continuous basis, not as separate parts.  This is basically what we’ve been “doing” for the last year, which is evidenced by her knowledge of the alphabet already.

But, it really came down to our family situation this year. With being pregnant for half of the year and a new baby coming, I needed something simple and easy to find activities for, since I really don’t want to fall out of having a little structure.  I know me.  If I start to let it slip completely, I’ll just sit around all day and let her watch tv.

My daughter is interested in reading and writing, so it seemed a no brainer.  I try to make it meaningful, and by  no means is the letter the center of every day of the week.  And there is a lot of talking or learning about other letters during the week.  In fact, I made sure we have at least 2 books that covered the entire alphabet during each week.

But, my main goal for the year is to keep up planned activities. It is not to make sure that this is the year she has all her letters and sounds down pat. Whether she ends this year knowing them all or not, I’ll know she had fun and will have learned lots of other things along the way.

So, there are a few components and ideas that can be implemented every month. I may or may not have done all of these each month. But, if you don’t want to bother with looking at each week’s activities, you could easily do one or more of these.

  1. Letter Dinner on Friday night (or at end of your week) – all the foods started with the letter, and she helped make as much of it as possible.
  2. Learn the letter in sign language
  3. Try to make the letter with body (whole body or maybe just fingers)
  4. Create a Letter Garden – draw letter in dirt, sprinkle seed, water (I think I might do this next year.)
  5. Find the letter – usually the first activity. I hide stickers with the letter written on them (upper case, lower case, cursive and manuscript) and put them on the lines of an outline of the letter.
  6. Letter to a friend whose name starts with the week’s letter
  7. Gather books from the library (or our own) that had the week’s letter as a focus (Not just in the title though…I also looked at character names, animals, etc.)
  8. Listen to songs that start with the letter
  9. Make Lego creations of things that start with the letter

And, although I don’t want her to go worksheet crazy, she really loves having these fun activities to do. Sometimes she tells me to print more! We did each of these for each letter.

  1. Letter Paths
  2. Letter Books (I only used three pages after the title page, but there are many more you could print out.)
  3. Uppercase Alphabet Trace and Color
  4. Animal Alphabet Coloring Letters
  5. Beginning Sound Coloring Pages
  6. Uppercase Letter Block Outlines
  7. Lowercase Letters Block Outlines

My goal with each week is to cover each subject, get messy, get moving, throw in some media and have a lot of fun process art activities. I tried to stay away from product art, but sometimes it was inevitable.  What I did when providing product art is try to make sure that there was something she was working on, usually cutting and glue. 🙂

Each of the following has a simple plan for the week. This covers 26 weeks.  They were not consecutive weeks.  If we were traveling, had other activities or I was just too tired, we did not do it.

Hope you find these useful for you and yours. (By the way, I do not recommend doing these every week. You will get bored and your child will get bored. I made the mistake of doing this when I was feeling up to it. I changed it to every other week. I have a folder of all the worksheets she didn’t finish for if she ever wants to do them, and there are very few before the letter L, which is where I started noticing that doing it weekly just was too much.)

  1. Letter A (3 years and 2 months)
  2. Letter B (3 years and 3 months)
  3. Letter C (3 years and 3 months)
  4. Letter D (3 years and 5 months)
  5. Letter E ( 3 years and 6 months)
  6. Letter F (3 years and 7 months)
  7. Letter G (3 years and 8 months)
  8. Letter H (3 years and 8 months)
  9. Letter I (3 years and 9 months)
  10. Letter J (3 years and 9 months)
  11. Letter K (3 years and 9 months)
  12. Letter L (3 years and 9 months)
  13. Letter M (3 years and 10 months)
  14. Letter N (3 years and 10 months)
  15. Letter O (3 years and 10 months)
  16. Letter P (3 years and 11 months)
  17. Letter Q (3 years and 11 months)
  18. Letter R (3 years and 11 months)
  19. Letter S (4 years)
  20. Letter T (4 years and 1 month)
  21. Letter U (4 years and 2 months)
  22. Letter V (4 years and 2 months)
  23. Letter W (4 years and 3 months)
  24. Letter X (4 years and 4 months)
  25. Letter Y (4 years and 4 months)
  26. Letter Z (4 years and 4 months)

Check out my Pinterest Alphabet board for more ideas.

Check here for any additional themes this year and what she learned when she was three.

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