A is for alligator

        

Now that R is weeks away from his third birthday, I thought I would start to introduce him to some letters. We started off at the beginning with the letter 'A'. I found this cute craft for 'A is for alligator' on pinterest and thought he would enjoy it. Although the task was set up for R, D wanted to join in too although she already knows the letter 'A'.

        

For this craft you will need a sheet of paper, some squares of green paper and some glue. I started by drawing an 'A' on the white paper as a guide for R to follow when sticking on the squares of green paper.

                 

Here they are sticking on the green paper. R needed prompting to stick the squares on the 'A' I had drawn!

        

Here is what the 'A' looks like. As we were doing 'A is for alligator' I turned the paper on it's side to look like an alligator's mouth.

        

Then I cut out some white teeth for the alligator and wrote capital A's on some and lower case a's on the rest. The children stuck the teeth inside the alligator's mouth. I wrote the A's for R but D wrote the A's on her own alligator teeth. 

Finally, the children drew eyes on their alligators. Above you can see R's handiwork.

        

I also gave R some more A practice by giving him some A's drawn on some paper and asking him to make dot's along the lines with his chubby pen.

         

He enjoys making dots along the lines!

        

D did multicoloured letters.

        

R followed the lines as well as making random dots on the paper, like in the centre of the 'a'!

        

Then I taught R how 'A' is the first sound of the word 'apple' I gave him a sequencing task to do out of curiosity to see if he had any difficulties in this area. He didn't and was easily able to put the pictures into the correct sequence. He needed a bit of help with the numbers as he cannot recognise written numbers yet.

               

Last year, we did a lot about apples when I was teaching D about the letter 'A'. We had lots of fun making apple crafts. 

        

We also did apple taste testing and had fun learning the words to describe the taste of the apples in three different languages.

How did you introduce the alphabet to your children?