I am so excited to be introducing our little one to the letters of the alphabet. We are just working on recognition of the letters at this point, but doing it by stating, “Aa is for ____” and “Bb is for ____”, and so on. For our first week of Alphabet Exploration we did:
Monday: Aa is for Abby (as in Abby Caddaby). G has a little Abby doll one of the grandparents got her and she loves it and sleeps with it every night. So after she was asleep on Sunday night I confiscated it from her crib and took it downstairs to set next to the alphabet flannel board I made. When G woke up, I got her dressed in her Abby slippers (she calls them Abby shoes) and took her downstairs to show her Abby. We talked about big A and little a and pointed to each letter. Then I gave her Abby to play with while I made her breakfast. Periodically throughout the day, we went back to the flannel board and pointed to and talked about each letter and said A is for Abby over and over. By the end of the day, she had it pretty settled that A was for Abby.
Tuesday: Aa is for Angel. Since we still had our Christmas decorations out, I placed one of the decorative angels that had caught G’s eye during the holidays and placed it next to the alphabet flannel board. We pointed out big A and little a again and talked about the letter A throughout the day. When I would ask: “A is for?” She would immediately say Abby and angel. This was going great. We had also done an angel craft which was still visible to Grace, so she pointed those out often throughout the day. We talked about what angels are and made sure the Bible story we read to her that night included an angel.
Wednesday: Aa is for Apple. G is kind of obsessed with applesauce at the moment, so I knew this one was a no brainer. I placed an apple toy next to the alphabet flannel board and we did as we had done on the days before. It is a first thing in the morning thing now. I hope she will soon be excited to see what is next to the board as we go downstairs in the mornings. She played with the apple toy while I made breakfast and constantly asked for applesauce. I told her we were going to make some later in the day so she was VERY excited when we made it at snack time. After she got up from her nap, we checked on the apple sauce and it was ready, so we chilled it for dinner. It was so good, she had two bowls.
Thursday: Aa is for Alligator. We have a small Fisher Price block with an alligator in it, so this was the toy for the day. When G came down, I gave it to her to play with while I made breakfast. After breakfast, we worked on snapping like an alligator, by stretching our arms out in front and opening wide and clapping. This gave her great joy and her face lit up!
Friday: Aa is for Airplane. I placed G’s airplane toy next to the flannel board and she was excited to find it there in the morning. It had been a little while since she had played with it. After breakfast we stuck our arms out and pretended to be airplanes, came in for landings and took off again. We talked about where we would go on an airplane (Texas, of course) and who we would see when we got there.
